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Copyright N° 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



^Oub0tatice an& patron): 

OR MORALITY AND RELIGION 



IN THEIR RELATION TO 



JFE: AN ESSAY UPO> 

THE PHYSICS OF 

CREATION. 



BY 

HENRY JAMES 




BOSTON: 

TICKNOR AND FIELDS. 

1863. 



^%\ 









Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by 

Henry James, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of 

Rhode Island. 



Riverside Press: 
Stereotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton. 



o- 



4 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

The Introduction 3 

CHAPTER I. 

Relation of Swedenborg to the Intellect. — His staunch vin- 
dication of human equality. — The angels devoid of personal 
worth. — Swedenborg's statements imply a profound Philosophy. 
— Its fundamental notion, the dependence of Morality. — Our 
moral force a perpetual communication • 31 



CHAPTER II. 

Moral life in order to spiritual. — Kant and Swedenborg. — 
Swedenborg's doctrine of the origin of Evil. — His sincere tes- 
timony to the actuality of creation. — Infinite love necessarily 
creative 50 



CHAPTER III. 

How the letter of Revelation degrades its spiritual contents. 
— Time and Space constitutional conditions of our conscious- 
ness. — Natural Religion affronts the heart even more than the 
head. — The Divine perfection is eminently human 65 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Divine Humiliation. — The creature must necessarily 
antagonize the creative perfection. — Personality the true mar- 
vel of creation. — The creature's identity the prime interest of 
creation. — The practical obstacle to it in the nature of the 
creature. — Revelation alone competent to the question 78 



iv Table of Contents. 

CHAPTER V. 

PAGE 

Philosophy's true function. — Treachery of philosophers to it. 
— Sir William Hamilton makes scepticism the basis of faith. — 
Kant makes real things unintelligible, and intelligible things un- 
real. — Sir William Hamilton runs Kant's doctrine into the 
ground. — Between the two Philosophy is reduced to a pious 
hiccup. — Philosophy is totally unharmed by the Positivists. — 
The total problem of Philosophy is to reconcile Freedom with 
Dependence. — Swedenborg alone solves it honestly and with- 
out ostentation 89 

CHAPTER VI. 

.Swedenborg's Doctrine of Nature. — Nature's total subordi- 
nation to spirit. — Discrimination of moral from spiritual life, 
largely illustrated ■ 106 

CHAPTER VII. 

Incompetency of reason in spiritual things. — Nature is an 
implication of the spiritual world. — It is according to Swe- 
denborg the Hand of God's Power. — Moral righteousness in- 
compatible with spiritual innocence. — The Law is intended 
to minister death. — Moral force characterizes us only in the 
infancy of our spiritual development. — The Law alone gives 
a knowledge of sin. — Delight in ritual righteousness fatal to 
spiritual life. — Our spiritual creation contingent upon our 
natural redemption. — We are born only to be reborn 118 

CHAPTER VIII. 

Morality is a platform for our spiritual regeneration. — ■ It is 
the subject earth of spiritual existence. — Natural existences 
forms of use. — Spiritual existences forms of power. — Nature's 
discords harmonized in man. — Our moral discords harmonized 
in the social development of the race. — Society or fellowship 
among men the proper outcome of the Divine redemption of 
Nature. — Thus the moral sentiment claims only a social glo- 
rification. — Individual regeneration is a fruit of our natural 
redemption. — Church and Srate are mere factors of a perfect 
society. — The Divine benignity 1 37 

CHAPTER IX. 

The letter of religion inversely serviceable to its spirit. — 
Revelation implies a veiling of spiritual truth ; i. e. a lowering 



Table of Contents. v 

PAGE 

of it to the capacity of carnal minds. — The Divine is prima- 
rily akin to our least reputable interests; or has chief regard to 
what men esteem the least. — Hostility of the religious con- 
science to God's humane perfection. — The fearful perversion 
which Orthodoxy makes of the Christian Atonement. — Rit- 
uality fatal to spirituality 156 



CHAPTER X. 

Testimony of experience. — The aim of all God's dealings 
with us is to undermine our virtue, or our conceit of our ability 
to be better in ourselves than other people. — Redemption the 
sole secret of creation. — The conscience of sin. — it is the 
only legitimate fruit of religious culture. — Is the conscience of 
sin real or dramatic? — 'The sectarian view absurd. — The 
judgment is exclusively a spiritual one. — The philosophic 
meaning of the judgment. — The true confession of sin is 
never a ritual one. — One's conscience of sin means inwardly 
his worship of God's perfection. — It is a mere practical decla- 
ration that God's goodness is ineffable 168 



CHAPTER XI. 

The Church affects a real sanctity. — She lives by adroitly 
flattering our self-righteous instincts. — Moral righteousness 
when regarded as a positive quantity, fatal to spiritual innocence 
and peace. — The church embodies and authenticates our nat- 
ural sottishness in Divine things. — She is the refuge and cita- 
del of a frenzied egotism and unbelief. — There are very many 
in the church who are not of it. — The church cannot confer 
both a literal and a spiritual sanctity. — Which alternative does 
she see fit to adopt ? — She adopts the latter 188 



CHAPTER XII. 

Salvation and damnation, spiritually interpreted, mean sever- 
ally to love and hate our kind. — The tap-root of character is 
one's conception of God. — The unhandsome fruits of Catholic 
religiosity. — The subtler but more harmful fruits of Protestant 
fanaticism. — When the son of man cometh, shall he find faith 
on the earth ? — The Jew and the Christian are, respectively, 
carnal type and spiritual substance. — Religion is now the idol 
of men's impure devotion. — The sole legitimate force of re- 
ligion cathartic not alimentative. — The true enemy of God is 

always the saint, never the sinner 205 

b 



vi Table of Contents. 

CHAPTER XIII. 

PAGE 

The kingdom of God to come on earth. — Man is a micro- 
cosm because the cosmos is a grand man. — The heart of men 
is much in advance of their head. — Regeneration impossible 
save through a redemption of Nature. — In Christ God is re- 
vealed as a glorified Natural man : hence Christianity por- 
tends a Divine innocence for man in the sphere of his natural 
life. — Our religious life is a standing opprobrium to the Divine 
name. — The life which Christ inaugurates in human nature is 
not post-mortem existence. — God is perfect Man 224 

CHAPTER XIV. 

The thorough redemption of Nature in Christ. — Christ is 
not a spirit but a Divine natural man. — Swedenborg scouts 
the notion of any arbitrary power in God, there being no infant 
who has not more. — Angel and devil both involved in Man. 
— Influence of the Christian truth in the natural sphere of 
the mind. — In Divine order the First is last, and the Last 
first. — Hell is glorified in conventional, Heaven in true, Man- 
hood > * 241 

CHAPTER XV. 

Nature implied in Man. — Incompetency of the church to 
interpret Revelation. Both Theology and Philosophy as at 
present administered only inflame our native Pharisaism. — 
There is but One Life, and we are His constant creatures. — 
The philosophic idea of creation. — It is the giving inward 
substance to what in itself is pure form. — Our subjective history 
involved in our objective creation. — A subject can never prop- 
erly be his own object. — Kant refutes creation by the fiction 
of noumenal existence. — Sir William Hamilton hereupon de- 
grades Philosophy into snivel 256 

CHAPTER XVI. 

Constitution is not character, any more than heart and lungs 
are the body. — Kant habitually confounds the two things, or 
supposes that you give being to things when you give them 
phenomenality. — Idealism the bane of Philosophy from the 
beginning of time till now. — Swedenborg puts a stop to phil- 
osophic guessing. — Hamilton and Mansel's testimony to Phi- 
losophy. — They make it an abject scepticism relieved by 
Cant 274 



Table of Contents. vii 

CHAPTER XVII. 

PAGE 

Kant's analysis of knowledge. — He makes knowledge a 
fact of physical constitution, not of spiritual creation. — Sci- 
ence has to do with the constitution of things ; Philosophy with 
their creation. — Science deals with the finite and relative ; 
Philosophy with the infinite and absolute. — Facts of life known 
from within ; facts of existence from without. — The consti- 
tution of a thing, or what makes it appear, is never what cre- 
ates it, or makes it be. — Life implies existence ; soul body* • 286 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

Life or consciousness unites what sense and reason disunite. 

— Sir William Hamilton's curious theory of the causal judg- 
ment. — He finds the cause of a thing in the thing's own en- 
trails. — Thus he thinks saltpetre is not merely constituted but 
caused by K O and N OS. — Cause evoked only to explain 
some breach of natural order. — We never ask the cause of 
Things, but only of their mutations. — Sir W. Hamilton stul- 
tifies intelligence by confounding Finiteness with Phenomenal- 
ity. — They are as distinct as sense and reason. — Cause is 
adduced to explain facts of phenomenal not of fixed existence. 

— It is not a sensible but a rational inquest. — Cause is a sci- 
entific rudiment of the philosophic idea of creation. — The 
force of the causal judgment is in its educating or disciplining 

the intellect 299 

CHAPTER XIX. 

John Mill's broad human sympathies*— -His failure never- 
theless to explain the causal instinct. — He also sinks the 
philosopher in the man of science. — He restricts cause to a 
merely constitutive not creative import. — He makes it signify 
only what identifies, not what individualizes things. — Philoso- 
phy reverses this judgment, giving cause a creative efficacy, or 
making it an attestation exclusively of the spiritual side of life, 
not of its material. — Cause invariably opens up the supernat- 
ural realm. — It is in this point of view solely that Philosophy 
envisages it. — Men of mere thought, not of life, like Kant, 
Sir William Hamilton, and the rest, deny cause a spiritual im- 
plication, because they resolve spiritual being itself into physi- 
cal constitution. — Kant makes the dissecting-room the school 
of Philosophy. — He found life so dazzling a thing to contem- 
plate, that he betook himself, to the unspeakable comfort of 



viii Table of Contents. 

PAGE 

his optics, to the contemplation of death instead : only unfor- 
tunately he misnamed that death life; and so, by his great au- 
thority over men of thought, not of life, stirred up any amount 
of dreary sepulchral literature. — His pretension to be the Co- 
pernicus of Philosophy. — His German and Scotch disciples* • 322 

CHAPTER XX. 

The fundamental misconception of the Critical Philosophy. 

— Kant's dread of Philosophy, lest it plainly avouch creation. 

— Common sense affirms creation. — Pseudo Philosophy denies 
it. — Kant's fatal philosophic delinquency, in exteriorating ob- 
ject to subject. — The extraordinary performances of Fichte, 
Schelling, and Hegel thereupon. — The testimony of sense one 
thing ; that of consciousness another. — Kant confounds them. 

— He thought finite and relative to be one and the same con- 
ception. — Sense divorces what consciousness marries. — Kant 
reduces Philosophy to a requiem over deceased hopes. — Na- 
ture a correspondence of the things of the mind. — Man its 
sole unity 347 

CHAPTER XXI. 

Alleged duality of Man and Nature in consciousness. — 
Their real unity there. — The objective sphere in life always 
controls the subjective sphere. — The ground of Kant's mis- 
take. — Are we properly active or passive in knowledge? — 
Noumenal existence fatal to creation. — Nature necessary to 
posit the creature, or give him identity. — Import of the dis- 
tinction between Identity and Individuality. — Philosophy must 
accept the guidance of Revelation. — Uncontrolled by Philoso- 
phy science is necessarily atheistic and logic pantheistic 371 



CHAPTER XXII. 

God is not voluntarily but spontaneously creative. — He can- 
not create Life, but only communicate it. — Before life can be 
communicated, a basis of communication must be organized. 

— Creation in order to be real exacts selfhood in the creature ; 
and hence claims to be a purely spiritual operation of God. — 
Orthodoxy turns creation into a mere physical exploit of God. 

— In truth, however, Nature is but a mask of God's spiritual 
presence. — The creature's identity the supreme care of the 
creative Love. — This interest requires that he be an inverse 
image of God's perfection. — Community, the essence of Na- 



Table of Contents. ix 

PAGE 
ture, inversely images the Divine unity. — Nature's sole func- 
tion is to embody the spiritual creation. — She incorporates 
spirit 395 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

Nature's part in creation is purely mediatorial. — It is im- 
plied in Man as body is implied in soul. — History is the vindi- 
cation of the human form in creation. — Adam a symbol of 
the Divine celestial, Eve of the Divine natural, mind. — We 
know ourselves at first only as sensuously defined. — Sweden- 
borg compels Nature into the limits of consciousness. — Our 
identity and our individuality equally abject masks of God's 
creative presence in us 419 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

The problem of creation. — Insoluble to faith and science 
alike. — Atheism or Pantheism a necessary logical result. — 
God must give His creature moral consciousness as well as 
physical being. — The inevitable implication of the finite con- 
sciousness. — Science is but a bridge between Religion and 
Philosophy. — Formula of our intellectual progress : Religion, 
Science, Philosophy. — Natural religion is bound to give way 
to science, while science herself however has no pretension to 
finality. — Science is only a handmaid to Philosophy. — Phi- 
losophy alone has power livingly to reinstate religion. — Relig- 
ion the heart, science the lungs, of the mind. — Science purges 
Faith of its sensuous elements. — Philosophy is the brain of 
the mind 1 434 



CHAPTER XXV. 

History summed up in the interests of church, state, and so- 
ciety. — Its practical scope is to free Eve from the domination 
of Adam ; that is, invert the relation of subserviency which 
the principle of Individuality is under to that of Universality. — 
It transfigures our natural communism itself into the intensest 
individuality. — Man by creation is perfectly imbecile in him- 
self. — Neither man angel nor devil has the least power in him- 
self. — Man's freedom utterly pliant to the Divine behests. — 
Marble is not so pliant to the hand of the sculptor. — Our na- 
tive evil a negative witness to the divinity of our origin. — Our 
experience of evil strictly constitutional or subjective. — Evil 
for man means the domination of the individual by the common 
1 



Table of Contents. 



PAGE 

life. — Good on the other hand means the social subjection of 
the common to the individual life 46 1 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

Spiritual import of the Gospel. — Creation means the giving 
natural substance to spiritual form. — Nature means the princi- 
ple of community in all existence. — Philosophic bearing of 
the Christian truth. — Consciousness always identifies us with 
maternal nature. — Why does the wife's personality merge in 
that of the husband ? — The reason to be found only in the sym- 
bolism of marriage. — Marriage typifies the union of infinite 
and finite in true manhood. — What has so long blinded us to 
the spiritual contents of Revelation ? — The church's supersti- 
tion. — Gloria in excelsis domino 484 



Appendix « 509 



THE INTRODUCTION. 



The leading words of my title-page call for 
a precise definition, in order that the reader may 
clearly discern the aim of the discussion to which 
I invite his attention. 

By morality I mean that sentiment of self- 
hood or property which every man not an idiot 
feels in his own body. It is a state of conscious 
freedom or rationality, exempting him from the 
further control of parents or guardians, and en- 
titling him in his own estimation and that of 
his fellows, to the undivided ownership of his 
words and deeds. It is the basis of conscience 
in man, or what enables him to appropriate good 
and evil to himself, instead of ascribing the for- 
mer as he may one day learn to do exclusively 
to celestial, the latter exclusively to infernal in- 
fluence. The word is often viciously used as a 
synonyme of spiritual goodness, as when we 
say, "A is a very moral man," meaning a just 
one ; or, " B is a very immoral man," meaning 
an unjust one. No man can be either good or 
evil, either just or unjust, but by virtue of his 
morality ; /. e. unless he have selfhood or free- 
dom entitling him to own his action. This is a 
conditio sine qua non. The action by which he 



4 The Introduction. 

becomes pronounced either the one sort of man 
or the other could not be his action, and conse- 
quently could never afford a basis for his spirit- 
ual development, unless he possessed this origi- 
nal moral force, or strict neutrality with respect 
to heaven and hell ; but would on the contrary 
be an effect in every case of overpowering 
spiritual influence. We should be very care- 
ful, therefore, not to confound the condition of 
an event with the event itself, as we do when 
we call the good man moral, and deny morality 
to the evil man. For if the good man alone 
be moral, while the evil man is immoral, then 
morality ceases to be any longer the distinctive 
badge of human nature itself* which separates 
it from all lower natures (so furnishing a plat- 
form for God's spiritual descent into it), and 
becomes the mere arbitrary endowment of cer- 
tain persons. The error in question originates 
in, at least is greatly promoted by, our habit 
of calling the decalogue " the moral law." As 
the law is instinct with an ineffable Divine sanc- 
tity, we get at last to think that the word which 
we so commonly couple with it partakes of 
right the same sanctity, and accordingly call 
only the man who obeys it moral, while he 
who disobeys it is immoral. In point of fact, 
however, morality means nothing more nor less 
than that state of natural neutrality or indiffer- 
ence to good and evil, to heaven and hell, which 
distinguishes man from all other existence, and 
endows him alone with selfhood or freedom. 
Thus the term properly designates our natural 



The Introduction. 5 

majority or manhood, what every man, as man, 
possesses in common with every other man. 

By religion I mean — what is invariably 
meant by the term where the thing itself still 
exists — such a conscience on man's part of a 
forfeiture of the Divine favor, as perpetually 
urges him to make sacrifices of his ease, his 
convenience, his wealth, and if need be his life, 
in order to restore himselfj if so it be possible, 
to that favor. This is religion in its literal 
form ; natural religion ; religion as it stands 
authenticated by the universal instincts of the 
race, before it has undergone a spiritual con- 
version into life, and while claiming still a 
purely ritual embodiment. It is however in 
this gross form the germ of all humane cul- 
ture. Accordingly we sometimes use the term 
in an accommodated sense, /. e. to express the 
spiritual results with which religion is fraught 
rather than the mere carnal embodiment it first 
of all offers to such results. Thus the apostle 
James says: Pure and undented religion (/. e., 
religion viewed no longer as a letter, but as a 
spirit), is to visit the fatherless and the widow, 
and keep oneself unspotted from the world (V. 
?., has exclusive reference to the life). We also 
say proverbially, handsome is that handsome 
does ; not meaning of course to stretch the 
word handsome out of its literal dimensions, but 
only by an intelligible metonomy of body for 
soul, or what is natural for what is spiritual, to 
express in a compendious way the superiority 
of moral to physical beauty. My reader will 



6 The Introduction. 

always understand me, then, as using the word 
religion in its strictly literal signification, to in- 
dicate our ritual or ceremonious homage to the 
Divine name. 

Now morality and religion, thus interpreted, 
are regarded on my title-page as concurring to 
promote the evolution of man's spiritual destiny 
on earth. 

Man's destiny on earth, as I am led to con- 
ceive it, consists in the realization of a perfect 
society, fellowship, or brotherhood among men, 
proceeding upon such a complete Divine subju- 
gation in the bosom of the race, first of self-love 
to brotherly love, and then of both loves to uni- 
versal love or the love of God, as will amount 
to a regenerate nature in man, by converting 
first his merely natural consciousness, which is 
one of comparative isolation and impotence, 
into a social consciousness, which is one of com- 
parative omnipresence and omnipotence; and 
then and thereby exalting his moral freedom, 
which is a purely negative one, into an aesthetic 
or positive form : so making spontaneity and 
not will, delight and no longer obligation, the 
spring of his activity. 

But morality and religion are further regarded 
on the title-page as bearing, in the evolution of 
the spiritual destiny of man on earth, the rela- 
tion respectively of substance and shadow. It 
only remains that I explicate this point, in order 
to put in the reader's hands the clew to my entire 
thought. 

A shadow is a phenomenon of vision pro- 



The Introduction. 7 

duced by some body intercepting the light. 
Thus the shadow of the tree upon the lawn is 
an effect of the tree intercepting the sun's rays. 
My shadow on the wall is an effect of my body 
intercepting the rays of the candle, and so forth. 
Evidently then three things concur to constitute 
a shadow : 1. a light ; 2. an opaque body which 
drinks up or refuses to transmit its rays ; 3. a 
background or suitable plane of projection on 
which such refusal becomes stamped. Thus the 
shadow which anything casts is strictly propor- 
tionate to its power of absorbing the light, or 
appropriating it to itself: which is only saying, 
in other words, that the shadow of a thing is 
the exact measure of its finiteness or imperfec- 
tion, /. e. of its destitution of true being. And 
this remark prepares us to ask what purpose 
the shadow serves, what intellectual use it 
renders. 

Obviously the use or purpose of shadows is 
to attest finite substance, or separate between 
phenomenal and real existence. Real existence 
is that which exists in itself, being vitalized 
from within. Phenomenal existence is that 
which exists only by virtue of its implication 
in something not itself, being vitalized wholly 
from without. In short real existence is spir- 
itual ; phenomenal existence natural. So far as 
I am spiritual, that is, to all the extent of my 
aesthetic or spontaneous life, I am a real exist- 
ence, possessing life in myself. So far as I am 
simply natural, that is, to all the extent of my 
instinctual and voluntary life, I am a phenome- 



8 The Introduction. 

nal existence, deriving my life from without. 
My spiritual manhood consequently casts no 
shadow. Whatsoever I do spontaneously; what- 
soever I do in obedience to the inspiration of 
Beauty; whatsoever I do, in short, from individ- 
ual taste or attraction in opposition to the com- 
mon instinct of self-preservation ; is good and 
beautiful in itself, is positively or infinitely good, 
as being without any contrast or oppugnancy 
of evil. But my physical and moral existence 
never fails to project a shadow. Let me be as 
beautiful physically as Venus or Apollo, still I 
am not really or positively, but only actually or 
apparently, so ; as by contrast with some oppo- 
site ugliness. Let me be morally as good as all 
saints and angels, it is yet not a good which is 
positive or stands by itself, but one which stands 
in the opposition of evil. In short, my beauty 
in the one case, and my goodness in the other, 
is finite ; and like all finite existence claims its 
attendant and attesting shadow. 

Clearly, then, the purpose of shadows is to 
attest finite or imperfect existence, existence 
which does not involve its own substance. The 
shadow which the tree casts upon the lawn, and 
that which my body projects upon the wall be- 
hind me, are a mute confession on the part of 
body and tree that they are purely finite and 
phenomenal existences: that while they sensibly 
appear to be in themselves, their being is yet in 
something very superior to themselves. Seek 
this tree a few years hence, and you will find no 
vestige of it remaining. Ask for this body a 



The Introduction. 9 

few months hence, possibly, and it will be in- 
distinguishable from the dust of the earth. This 
is what the shadow invariably says : — that the 
substance which projects it is a mere appear- 
ance to the senses, not a reality to the philo- 
sophic understanding; and that if we would 
penetrate the world of realities we must trans- 
cend the realm of sense, the finite realm, and 
enter that of mind or spirit. 

We now fairly discern the constitution of 
the shadow, and what is its rational scope and 
significance ; and are thus prepared to interpret 
the greatest of shadows which we call Religion, 
and which falls everywhere across the page of 
human history darkening the face of day, turn- 
ing the fairest promise of nature to blight, un- 
dermining the most towering pride of morality 
by a subtle conscience of sin, and forbidding 
man to content himself with a righteousness, a 
peace and a power which shall be anything less 
than Divine. 

The reader recalls the constitution of the 
shadow, namely, that it is always an effect 
of some opaque body intercepting the rays of 
light. Thus the shadow which the tree projects 
upon the lawn is an effect of the tree intercept- 
ing the sun's rays ; and the shadow of my per- 
son on the wall an effect of my body intercept- 
ing the rays of the lamp. In like manner 
precisely this stupendous shadow designated by 
the name of Religion, is an effect produced by 
our moral consciousness intercepting the rays 
of the Divine Truth as they shine forth from 



10 The Introduction. 

man's social destiny. The three elements which 
determine its constitution as a shadow are thus 
distributed : History being the sole field of its 
projection; Morality the opaque substance which 
alone projects it; and the Social principle, the 
principle of a perfect society fellowship or broth- 
erhood among men, being the great Divine light, 
of whose obscuration by morality religion has 
always been at once the shadow and the scourge. 
So much definition seems due by way of pref- 
ace in vindication of the title of my book, or 
in order to apprise my reader that I regard Re- 
ligion and Morality as respectively shadow and 
substance in their relation to the social develop- 
ment of the race. Society — fellowship — equal- 
ity — fraternity, whatever name you give it, is 
the central sun of human destiny, originating all 
its motion, and determining the pathway of its 
progress towards infinite Love and Wisdom. 
Morality and Religion together constitute the 
subject-earth of self-love which revolves about 
this centre, now in light now in shade; morality 
being the illuminated side of that love, religion 
its obscured side; the one constituting the splen- 
dor of its day, the other the darkness of its night. 
Morality is the summer lustihood and luxuriance 
of self-love, clothing its mineral ribs with vege- 
table grace, permeating its rigid trunk with sap, 
decorating its gnarled limbs with foliage, glori- 
fying every reluctant virgin bud and every mod- 
est wifely blossom into rich ripe motherly fruit. 
Pteligion is the icy winter which blights this 
summer fertility, which arrests the ascent of its 



The Introduction. 1 1 

vivifying sap, and humbles its superb life to the 
ground, in the interests of a spring that shall be 
perennial, and of autumns bursting with imperish- 
able fruit. In other words, religion has no sub- 
stantive force. Her sole errand on earth has 
been to dog the footsteps of morality, to humble 
the pride of selfhood which man derives from 
nature, and so soften his interiors to the recep- 
tion of Divine Truth, as that truth stands ful- 
filled in the organization of human equality or 
fellowship. 

The backbone of morality has long been 
providentially broken. The moral force men 
once had, the power of controlling natural ap- 
petite and passion, has abated, and in its place 
has come a sense of God's presence in Nature, and 
the aspiration to realize in life the infinite Beauty 
which she reveals. Almost no one is now strong 
by himself, strong against the floods of natural 
arrogance and cupidity which are sure to assail 
him, but only by association with others. Scarce- 
ly any one resists the temptation to which he is 
naturally prone on religious grounds, or from a 
sentiment of reverence to the Divine name, but 
only on social grounds or from a sentiment of 
what is due to good-fellowship. The failure to 
see this great change in human nature, and to 
organize it betimes in appropriate institutions, 
is what keeps us in this state of public and 
private demoralization, which has at last resulted 
in the downfall of our political edifice. See 
what thorough-paced unconscious scoundrels we 
have long had for politicians. Observe how apt 



12 "The Introduction. 

our men in office are to lend themselves to atro- 
cious jobbery; how incessantly public and pri- 
vate trusts are betrayed; how our clergy in such 
large numbers habitually emasculate and stultify 
the gospel, in order to adapt it to the dainty ears 
of the fierce worldlings who underpin their ec- 
clesiastical consequence; how ostentation, un- 
bridled luxury of every sort, and the shameless 
apery of foreign class-pretension, even down to 
the decorating our imported servants with 
imported liveries, are corrupting us from our 
original democratic simplicity ; how rapidly 
immodesty, dissipation, insolence, and the most 
unblushing egotism are vulgarizing the man- 
ners, hardening the visages, and hopelessly blast- 
ing the hereditary remains of innocence of our 
rich young men and women ; — and who can 
doubt that Jeff Davis, Joe Smith, filibuster 
Walker, secretary Floyd, James Buchanan, and 
all the other dismal signs and portents of our 
current political and religious life, have been 
only so many providential scourges sent to 
devastate and consume a world long ripe for 
the Divine judgment ? 

The only possible explanation of the existing 
crisis in human affairs, everywhere indeed, com- 
patible with the Divine sovereignty, is, that the 
moral force in man no longer subserves the 
great spiritual uses which once sanctified and 
sweetened it ; that the mission which was once 
Divinely given it of nurturing men for the skies 
has been revoked and put in more competent 
hands. This to my judgment is as plain as any- 



The Introduction. 13 

thing can well be. The moral force was never 
anything but a scaffolding for God's spiritual 
house in the soul; it was never designed to give 
permanent substance but only temporary form 
to God's finished work in human nature ; and 
when accordingly it ceases to look upon itself 
in this subordinate plight, and insists upon be- 
ing treated not as the scaffolding but as the 
house, not as the mould but as the substance to 
be moulded, not as the matrix but as the gem, 
in short, not as an accessory but as a principal, 
it loses even this justification and becomes a 
positive nuisance. The social sentiment, the 
sense of a living organic unity among men, is 
accordingly fast absorbing it or taking it up 
into its own higher circulation, whence it will 
be reproduced in every regenerate sesthetic form. 
Art is the resurgent form of human activity. 
The artist or producer is the only regenerate im- 
age of God in nature, the only living revelation 
of the Lord on earth. Society itself will erelong 
release her every subject from that responsibility 
to his own material interests which has hitherto 
degraded human life to the ground, and by provid- 
ing for his honest and orderly physical subsistence, 
leave his heart and mind and hand free to the 
only inspiration they spontaneously acknowledge, 
— that of infinite Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. 
This most profound and intimate life of God in 
our nature is groping its way to more and more 
vivid consciousness in us every day ; and the 
consequence is that we see the proud old Pagan 
ideal of moral virtue, a virtue which inheres in 



14 The Introduction. 

the subject himself as finitely constituted or dif- 
ferenced from all other men, giving place to the 
humble and harmless Christian ideal of a purely- 
spiritual virtue in man, a virtue which inheres 
in him only as he becomes infinitely constituted, 
or united with all other men, by the unlimited 
indwelling of God in his nature. The Pagan 
goodness proceeds upon self-denial, and hence 
implies merit. The Christian goodness proceeds 
upon the frankest and fullest possible self-asser- 
tion, and hence implies boundless humility or 
gratitude. "After those days, saith the Lord, I 
will put my law in their inward parts, and write 
it in their hearts." 

As the shadow obeys the law of the substance, 
so religion is bound to undergo a proportionate 
modification with that of morality. This is why 
religion in the old virile sense of the word has 
disappeared from sight, and become replaced by 
a feeble Unitarian sentimentality. The old re- 
ligion involved a conscience of the profoundest 
antagonism between God and the worshipper, 
which utterly refused to be placated by any- 
thing short of an unconditional pledge of the 
utmost Divine mercy. The ancient believer felt 
himself sheerly unable to love God, or do any- 
thing else towards his salvation, were it only the 
lifting of a finger. To un-love was his only 
true loving, to un-learn his only true learning, to 
un-do his only true doing. The modern relig- 
ionist is at once amused and amazed at these 
curious archaeological beginnings of his own his- 
tory. He feels towards them as a virtuoso does 



The Introduction. 15 

towards what is decidedly rococo in fashion, and 
not seldom bestows a word of munificent Phari- 
saic patronage upon them, such as the opulent 
Mr. Ruskin dispenses to uncouth specimens of 
early religious Art. He has not the slightest 
conception of himself as a spiritual form in- 
wardly enlivened by all God's peace and inno- 
cence. On the contrary, he feels himself to be 
a strictly moral or self-possessed being, vivified 
exclusively by his own action, or the relations 
he voluntarily assumes with respect to human 
and Divine law. The modern believer aspires 
to be a saint; the ancient one abhorred to be 
anything but a sinner. The former looks back 
accordingly to some fancied era of what he calls 
conversion : /". e. when he passed from death to 
life. The latter was blissfully content to forget 
himself, and looked forward exclusively to his 
Lord's promised spiritual advent in all the forms 
of a redeemed nature. The one is an absolutely 
changed man, no longer to be confounded with 
the world, and meet for the Divine approbation. 
The other is a totally unchanged one, only more 
dependent than he ever was before upon the 
unmitigated Divine mercy. The one feels sure 
of going to heaven if the Lord observes the dis- 
tinctions which his own grace ordains in human 
character. The other feels sure of going to hell 
unless the Lord is blessedly indifferent to those 
distinctions. 

I might multiply these contrasts to any length, 
but my desire is only briefly to indicate how 
very near and intimate God's spiritual approxi- 



]6 "The Introduction. 

mation to our nature must have become, in 
order to justify those hopes of the purely natu- 
ral heart towards him. It is impossible to go to 
the Church in , and observe how skil- 
fully and yet unconsciously the gifted minister 
of that parish appeals to all that is most selfish 
and most worldly in the bosoms of his hearers, in 
order to build them up a fragrant temple for the 
Divine indwelling, without feeling one's heart 
melt with adoration of the Infinite Love which 
is taking to itself at last the riches of the earth, 
and making the kingdoms of this world also 
forever its own. In short, both the world and 
the church from having been very dense are be- 
coming almost transparent masks of God's inef- 
fable designs of mercy to universal man, and 
are helping along in their blind delirious way 
the speedy advent of a scientific human society 
or brotherhood upon earth. If accordingly my 
reader discover as he conceives in the progress 
of my book any animus of hostility either to the 
polite or the religious world, he will do me the 
justice to believe that such appearance is only 
the negative or literal aspect of a love, which 
on its positive or spiritual side embraces univer- 
sal man. 

Let me indeed insist on this justice. It is 
evident enough throughout my book, of course, 
that I assail ritual or professional religion with 
undissembled good-will; yet it is quite equally 
evident, I hope, that I never for a moment do 
so in the interest of irreligion, but exclusively 
in the interest of its own imprisoned spirit. 



The Introduction. 17 

Daily I visit this sepulchre in which the Lord 
lay buried. I find the spiced linen garments in 
which he was embalmed reverently exhibited, 
and the napkin that was about his sacred head 
tenderly folded away and cherished ; but no fa- 
miliar feature of his vanished form remains; 
he is indeed no longer there but risen. All 
that was late so helpless in him has become 
glorified and triumphant; all that was late so 
human and finite has become Divine and infi- 
nite. I find, in other words, any amount of literal 
or personal homage addressed to Christ in the 
church; but never a glance that I can discern 
of spiritual recognition. And yet this alone is 
real and living; all the rest is dramatic and 
dead. Let us call him Lord ! Lord ! as much 
as we please, and lift up the devoutest possible 
eyes to some imaginary throne he is supposed 
to occupy in the super-celestial solitudes; we 
are utterly inexcusable for so doing, since if we 
believe his own most pointed and memorable 
counsels, (Matthew xxv. 31-46,) he is no longer 
to be found spiritually isolated from, but only 
most intimately associated with, the business and 
bosom of universal man: that is to say, only 
wherever there is hunger to be filled, thirst to be 
slaked, homeless want to be housed, nakedness 
to be clad, sickness to be relieved, prison-doors 
to be opened. 

No doubt the church will answer that a man's 
soul is worth more to him than all the world be- 
side; that God busies himself with the spiritual 
interests of humanity rather than its material 



l8 The Introduftion. 

interests. Unquestionably. But how if He can- 
not deal directly with its spiritual interests with- 
out impairing them \ How if His only safe 
way of dealing with them, is to do so indirect- 
ly, that is, by means of its material interests'? 
Of course no reasonable man can doubt that 
God's real and primary delight is to appease the 
spiritual wants, and assuage the spiritual woes 
of humanity, which are accurately symbolized 
under these images of mere material destitution 
and distress. But then we must recollect that 
He is utterly unable to effect these ends save by 
the mediation of his own truth, or in so far as 
our private individual commerce with him has 
been organized upon, and energized by, a pre- 
vious recognition of his boundless presence and 
operation in human nature itself. God's private 
mercies to us, in other words, do not prejudice, 
but on the contrary irresistibly exact or presup- 
pose, this grander public operation of His, this 
stupendous work of redemption which he has 
practised in our very nature itself, as the basis 
of their own vitality. Let me elucidate this 
proposition a little. 

Whatever be the Lord's unmistakeable good- 
will towards the spiritual or immortal conjunc- 
tion of every individual soul of man with him- 
self, it is nevertheless evident that such a result 
to be permanent can never be forced, but must 
conciliate in every case the legitimate instincts 
of the soul, which are freedom and rationality. 
If God would have my love and have it eter- 
nally, he must exhibit his perfect worthiness to 



The Introduttion. 19 

be loved in such a way as to take captive my 
heart and understanding. Now as naturally 
constituted, or when left to myself, I am a being 
of consummate selfishness and covetousness. I 
unconsciously exalt myself above all mankind, 
and would grasp, if that were possible, the riches 
of the universe. It were obvious and unmixed 
deviltry simply to condemn this natural make 
of mine, or turn it over to ruthless punish- 
ment. It is, on the other hand, unmixed divin- 
ity to condescend to these natural limitations, to 
come down to the level and breathe the atmos- 
phere of these overpowering lusts, to live in the 
daily and hourly intimacy of their illusions, their 
insanities, their ferocities and impurities, until at 
length by patiently separating what is relatively 
good in them from what is relatively evil, and 
then subjecting the latter to the unlimited ser- 
vice of the former, the two warring elements 
become bound together in the unity of a new 
or regenerate natural personality, in which in- 
terest will spontaneously effect what principle 
has hitherto vainly enjoined; or self-love accom- 
plish with ease what benevolence has only been 
able hitherto weakly to dream of accomplishing. 
If now we appeal to the word of God, which is 
Christian doctrine, this is precisely what God 
does ; and if we appeal to his work, which is the 
history of Christendom, the response is equally 
full and clear. Revelation and History both alike 
proclaim with unmistakeable emphasis that God 
chooses the foolish things of the world to con- 
found the wise, the weak things to confound 



20 "The Introduction. 

the mighty, and base things and things which 
men despise, yea and things which are not, hath 
God chosen, to bring to nought established 
things, in order that no flesh should exalt itself 
in his presence. 

This alone is why I love God, if indeed I 
do at all love Him. I hate Him with a cordial 
hatred — of this at least I am very sure — for 
his alleged incommunicable infinitude, for that 
cold and solitary grandeur which my natural 
reason ascribes to Him, and which entitles Him, 
according to the same authority, to exact the 
endless servile homage of us poor worms of the 
dust. For all this difference between God and 
me as affirmed by my natural deism, — which is 
my reason unillumined by revelation, — my 
crushed and outraged affections writhe with un- 
speakable animosity towards him. It is only 
when I read the gospel of his utter condescension 
to my foul and festering nature, and discern the 
lucent lines of his providence in the world illus- 
trating and authenticating every word and tone 
of that gospel, — it is only, in other words, when 
I see how sheerly impersonal and creative his love 
is, i. £., how incapable of regarding itself and how 
irresistibly communicative of its own blessedness 
to whatsoever is not itself, to whatsoever is most 
hostile and repugnant to itself, that my soul 
catches her first glimpse of the uncreated holi- 
ness, and heart and head and hand conspire in 
helpless, speechless, motionless adoration. 

In short, no one can love God simply by 
wishing to love Him, still less by feeling it a 






Ike Introduction. 21 

duty to love Him. At this rate one could never 

love his fellow-man even, but would come at 
las: infallibly to hate him. In other words, 
love is never voluntary but always spontaneous. 
Its objective or unconscious element invariably 
controls its subjective or conscious one. I 
love my wife or child not by any force of my 
own. but by virtue altogether of a force which 
their innocence and sweetness lend me. It is 
their natural or cultivated grace which empow- 
ers me to love ; abstract this, and I should be 
impotent as a clod. So also I can never love 
God by any force of my own. His absolute 
worth indeed makes it even more impossible 
for me to love Him, than my wife's or child's 
relative imperfection makes it impossible for me 
to love them : namely, by removing Him spirit- 
ually to such a distance from me as to make 
hatred rather than love towards Him, an instinct- 
ive dictate of my own self-respect. If then I 
can never hope to love God by my own force, 
He himself must enable me to love Him. How 
shall He do this without overpowering my con- 
scious freedom or rationality"? Why simply by 
taking upon Himself the conditions of my na- 
ture, or coming to know experimentally how 
irresistibly prone the finite mind is by the mere 
fact of its finiteness to lie, to steal, to commit 
adultery and murder, in order that, being thus 
tempted like as we are, yet without sin — being 
thus touched with a feeling of our infirmities, 
and yet rigidly self-debarred from the actual dis- 
order in which they are sure to terminate with 



22 The Introduction. 

us — He may give them totally new and unex- 
pected issues in harmony with His own univer- 
sality of love and providence. In other words, 
let God reveal Himself to my intelligence as a 
natural man, as a sympathetic partaker of my 
own corrupt nature, not with any view as my 
natural reason alleges to condemn and denounce 
it, but only to purify and exalt it to the measure 
of His own infinitude, and I shall necessarily 
love Him, love Him with such a reality and in- 
tensity of love as reconciles me even to my past 
natural animosity, and fills me moreover with 
His own unspeakable tenderness towards the 
possible natural animosity of all mankind. 

This briefly stated is all I mean by saying that 
our private or individual regeneration is wholly 
conditioned upon a great and sincere work of 
redemption accomplished by God in human na- 
ture ; so that every really regenerate person, 
every one reconciled in heart to the Divine 
ways, feels himself an unlimited dependent upon 
the unbought Divine mercy, and scorns nothing 
so cordially as the pretence of a superior person- 
al sanctity in the Divine regard, to that of the 
veriest reptile that shares and illustrates his na- 
ture. 

And this will also explain to the reader why, 
in the progress of my book, I have felt myself 
called upon to deal so frankly with our ritual 
or professional religion. It is because religion 
as an institution no longer subserves the great 
human uses which once alone consecrated it, 
but has sunk into an impudent canonization of 



The Introduftion. 23 

the vulgarest private and sectarian pretension. 
It has so completely renounced its ancient and 
purely typical sanctity, and challenges nowa- 
days such an absolute prestige, or prestige in 
its own right, to men's regard, that the veracious 
public witness it once bore to the truth of all 
men's equal and utter personal alienation and 
remoteness from God, has become degraded 
into the lying testimony of some A, B, or C's 
individual regeneration and salvation. From a 
sincere record of our universal natural destitu- 
tion and despair, it has sunk into a flattering 
witness of our private wealth, of our strictly 
individual assurance or presumption. The dis- 
tinctively spiritual or human substance which 
alone sanctifies religious aspiration and saves it 
from blasphemy, is humility, is an unaffected 
contrition on the part of the worshipper for the 
pride and rapacity which he perceives underly- 
ing his finite consciousness, and forever separat- 
ing him from the Divine. In short, a conscience 
of death is the sole legitimate flower of the re- 
ligious experience; death to every cherished 
pretension the worshipper feels of ever being 
personally any purer better holier in the Divine 
sight than any criminal that ever was hung. 

Scarcely a vestige of this most ancient truth 
survives in our modern profession; or if it does, 
survives in chronic not in acute form. To 
"experience religion," or "become converted," 
means now not what it once meant, to pass from 
the noon-tide radiance of natural force and self- 
confidence into the grimmest midnight of spirit- 



24 The Introduction. 

ual impotence and self-distrust, but all simply to 
jump from a grossly absurd fear of God's per- 
sonal enmity to us grounded on our moral de- 
linquencies, or perhaps our purely ritual unclean- 
ness, into a more grossly absurd hope of His 
personal complacency towards us, based upon 
some inward mystical change which He himself 
has arbitrarily wrought in us. Thus viewed, 
religion no longer witnesses to the truth of 
God's immutable perfection, but only to the 
capricious operation of His spirit ordaining cer- 
tain differences in human character, whereby 
one man becomes avouched in his proper per- 
son an heir of heaven, another stigmatized as a 
child of hell. Look at the social consequences 
of this most real but unrecognized spiritual 
buffoonery, how inevitably it depresses all that 
is sweet and modest and unexacting in manners, 
and forces into conspicuity whatsoever is for- 
ward, ungenerous, and despotic. Look at any 
of our ecclesiastical coteries, and observe how 
torpid grows the proper spiritual or human force 
of its members, while every shabbiest pattern 
of a formalist is radiant, twittering, and alert 
with preternatural activity. No doubt very 
many of the clergy are personally superior to 
their office, and feel their instinctual modesty 
outraged by the spirit of servility and adula- 
tion which it appears to have the faculty of 
eliciting on the part of their adherents. But 
how can they help themselves? Professional 
religion means the claim of a private sanctity, 
of a strictly personal and individual worth in 



The Introduction. 25 

God's sight, by which the subject is eternally 
differenced from other men ; and the clergy are 
the protagonists or defenders each in his sect of 
this debased state of the public mind, so that to 
be personally flattered and cockered and excused 
and apologized for out of all reasonable shape 
of manhood, by precisely the style of people 
whose opinions they least value, seems above all 
things their just official Nemesis or retribution. 
In a spiritual point of view the clergy are most 
real martyrs to their perilous calling. 

As to the attitude of the Divine mind towards 
the separatist or Pharisaic portion of the world, 
/. e. towards those who are identified with the 
outward profession of serving Him, the New 
Testament leaves no doubt on that subject, but 
ratifies every instinct of our proper humanity. 
The parables of the Prodigal Son and of the 
Publican and Pharisee praying, justify every 
prevision of common sense in the premises. 
Surely if I have a family of children the eldest 
of whom is alone legitimate, and therefore alone 
entitled to my name and estate, while all the 
younger children are bastards, and consequently 
destitute of all legal righteousness, I should be 
a worm and no man, if; while according to the 
former his fullest legal consideration, I did not 
bestow my tenderest and ripest affection and 
indulgence upon the latter. If my acknowl- 
edged heir, conceiving himself prejudiced by 
this action on my part, should grow angry and 
reproach me thereupon, saying, " Lo ! these 
many years do I serve thee, neither have I 



26 The Introduction. 

ever transgressed thy commandments, and yet 
thou hast never given me the slightest expres- 
sion of thy heart's delight, such as thou art now 
lavishing upon those others who have wasted 
thy substance with riotous living : " this strain 
of remonstrance would only prove how essen- 
tially incompatible legal or literal heirship is 
with spiritual heirship ; how infinitely short the 
most faultless moral righteousness falls of in- 
ward or spiritual innocence ; but it would never 
prove me unrighteous. Nothing could be easier 
for me than to show my dissatisfied and envi- 
ous offspring that I had at all events done him 
no injustice. I should say, " My son, I leave 
it to yourself to estimate the claim which the 
service you boast of exerts upon my heart, now 
that your shameless inhumanity to your less for- 
tunate brethren reveals even to your own eyes 
the spirit which has always animated that ser- 
vice; a spirit of unlimited self-seeking, of low 
prudence or worldly conformity, befitting indeed 
the elder son (or head), but totally alien to the 
temper of the younger son (or heart). The ser- 
vice you render I am sure of at all times [son, 
thou art ever with me], because it is an inter- 
ested service, prompted by your self-love alone. 
It is the homage of the proud self-righteous 
rapacious head, and though I have no power 
and no desire to balk its legal expectations [and 
all that I have is thine], it yet awakens in my 
bosom no emotion of pleasure, begets no throb 
of gratified paternal affection. It is the homage 
of the heart exclusively, the prodigal, unright- 






The Introduction. 27 

eous, unexacting heart [I will say unto him, 
Father, I have sinned against heaven and before 
thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy 
son: make me as one of thy hired servants] 
which opens up the responsive fountains of my 
heart, which satisfies the hunger and thirst of 
my paternal bosom, and irresistibly compels 
therefore every answering outward demonstra- 
tion of my inmost pride and joy, of my ex- 
quisite spiritual delight and blessedness. You 
shall have accordingly your legal deserts to the 
utmost, all that you have bargained for ; all 
that I outwardly possess shall be yours, while 
I bestow myself, all that I inwardly am, upon 
your humbler brethren." 

Thus much I feel called upon to say to the 
reader by way of forewarning, or in order that 
he may observe that I do not quarrel with the 
living spirit of religion, which glows in every 
breast of man where God's own spirit of humil- 
ity, meekness, equality, fellowship, is cultivated 
and reproduced however feebly; but only with 
what the best men in history have always quar- 
relled with, namely, its dead and putrid body 
which still goes unburied and taints God's 
wholesome air with its baleful exhalations. Re- 
ligion disdains any longer a literal or ritual 
establishment. It claims a purely living and 
spiritual embodiment, such as flows from God's 
sanctifying presence and animating power in 
every form of spontaneous human action. It 
has no longer anything to do accordingly with 
churches or with clergy, with sabbaths or with 



28 The Introduction. 

sacraments, with papacy or with prelacy, with 
Calvin or Socinus; but only with a heart in its 
subject of unaffected love to all mankind, and 
unaffected fellowship consequently with every 
person and every thing however convention- 
ally sacred or profane, that seeks to further that 
love by the earnest distaste disuse and undoing 
of whatsoever plainly withstands perverts or 
abuses it. 






AN ESSAY 



PHYSICS OF CREATION. 



By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down ; yea, we wept, 
when we remembered Zion. 

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. 

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song ; 
and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of 
the songs of Zion. 

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land ? 

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cun- 
ning ! 

If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of 
my mouth ; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy ! 

Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusa- 
lem ; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof. 

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed ; happy shall he 
be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. 

Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against 
the stones. — Psalm cxxxvii. 



AN ESSAY 



ON THE 



PHYSICS OF CREATION. 



CHAPTER I. 

Many of my friends have at various times 
asked me to give them a brief statement of my 
views as to the practical bearing of Sweden- 
borg's writings upon the intellect. As I under- 
stand the request, they do not care to have a 
mere recapitulation of Swedenborg's intellectual 
principles, for these are palpable to sight on 
every page of his books : they simply seek to 
know what judgment I, who hold these prin- 
ciples to be rationally indisputable, feel myself 
compelled to form with respect to their prac- 
tical operation in the realms of speculation and 
action. 

Judgments of this nature must vary of course 
according to the various temper and culture of 
the persons who render them. Truth is always 
modified to its subject by his own states of life : 
/. e. by the attitude of his heart towards Good. 
What is grapes to one intelligence is thistles to 
another, and the bramble bush of one spiritual 
latitude is the fig-tree of its opposite. To the 



32 Relation of Swedenborg 

pure God shows himself pure ; to the froward 
he shows himself froward. " A man receives," 
says Swedenborg, "only so much as he either 
has of himself, or makes his own by looking 
into things for himself: what exceeds these lim- 
its passes off" 1 

Interpreting Swedenborg's general relation 
then to the intellect by the effect his books 
produce upon mine, I should say that their 
direct tendency was, to assert and vindicate such 
an intimate Divine presence and operation in 
the lowest depths of consciousness, as will ere- 
long practically obliterate all those superficial 
differences in human character upon which our 
social legislation has been hitherto exclusively 
based, by spiritually shutting up all men — good 
and evil alike — to a dependence upon God so 
vital and absolute, as to make the pretension of 
independence a mark of spiritual idiocy and death. 

Let me explain. Human society — what lit- 
tle of it at least the exigencies of Priest and 
King, of church and state, have permitted to 
get body or become visible — has been organ- 
ized in all the past upon the belief of a radical 
diversity in human nature, a fundamental dis- 
tinction among men of good and evil. Society 
has not been content to affirm that one man 
was good and another evil, as they stood sever- 
ally related to herself, that is, to human prog- 
ress. She has declared them to be absolutely 
good or evil, /. e. good and evil in themselves, 
irrespective of their relations to any third thing. 

' l Arc. Cel., 3803. 



to the Intellect 33 

The good man has always been thought to be 
good in himself, absolutely good, and thus even 
more sure of attracting the Divine complacency 
than ours. The evil man, the liar, thief, adul- 
terer, murderer, has always been regarded as 
essentially, or in himself, a worse man than he 
who refrains from these odious practices. And 
society accordingly in rewarding the one and 
punishing the other, as the law of self-preserva- 
tion has hitherto bound her to do, has appar- 
ently never doubted that she was performing 
a work of absolute righteousness, permanently 
consonant with the Divine name ; above all, has 
never for a moment suspected that the glaring 
diversities of character and action she perpetu- 
ally signalized were all the while the fruit ex- 
clusively of her own immaturity. 

Now Swedenborg's writings reverse this su- 
perficial judgment, or turn it into a mere preju- 
dice on our part, having no more valid basis 
than any other superstition which our devout 
but unenlightened reverence has temporarily 
hallowed. His writings effectually invalidate 
the alleged radical discrepancy among men in 
God's sight, by proving all men without excep- 
tion to be in themselves, or apart from God's 
operation in their nature, alike prone ro evil 
and falsity. Swedenborg uniformly denies that 
personal distinctions among men, distinctions of 
merely natural temperament and character, have 
the least spiritual validity. He denies that it is 
possible for the Divine being to feel the slightest 
emotion of tenderness or complacency towards 



34 His Staunch Vindication 

one person as naturally constituted (say, the 
apostle John,) which He does not feel towards 
every othei person, however differently consti- 
tuted (say, Judas Iscariot). He utterly denies 
the pretension of any creature of God to be 
spiritually any better, /. e. any better in himself, 
than any other creature, however comparatively 
degraded the latter may be in all moral or per- 
sonal regards. And doing all this in entire 
good faith — scourging out of rational sight for- 
ever the conception of any personally meritori- 
ous or personally blameworthy relation of man 
to God — he of course makes it inevitable to 
conclude against the absolute wisdom of our 
past social legislation. Indeed, he does more 
than this. He powerfully disposes his intelli- 
gent reader to all those tendencies of modern 
thought, which go to urge upon society the 
paramount obligation she herself is under of 
self-examination, self-denial, and self-humilia- 
tion, in order that vice and crime may be no 
longer punished merely, but actually and per- 
manently extinguished. 

In one word, Swedenborg refutes the possi- 
bility of a moral righteousness on man's part 
before God : /. e. a righteousness which inheres 
in the man himself and is not exclusively de- 
rived to him from the equal Divine influx and 
indwelling in all the forms of our nature. And 
hence, of course, he stamps all those contrary 
judgments of character upon which our ordi- 
nary social legislation proceeds, as practically 
puerile and visionary. 



of Human Equality. 35 

But he makes much more thorough work of 
it than this. He maintains this uncompromis- 
ing truth of every man's equality with every 
other man before God, not merely in respect 
to men on earth, or as they stand reciprocally 
distinguished to our sight by differences of nat- 
ural temperament and moral character; but also 
with respect to men in heaven, or as they stand 
spiritually differenced one from another to the 
Divine sight by their various relation to the 
infinite Goodness and Truth. "In heaven no 
attention is paid to person, nor the things of 
person, but to things abstracted from person. 
Hence they have no recognition of a man from 
his name or other personal attributes, but only 
from his distinctive human faculty or quality. 
The thought of persons limits the angelic idea, 
or gives it finiteness; whereas that of things 
does not limit it, but gives it infinitude. No 
person named in the Word is recognized in 
heaven, but only the human quality or sub- 
stance symbolized by that person ; neither any 
nation or people, but the human quality of such 
nation and people. Thus there is not a single 
fact of Scripture concerning person, nation, or 
people which is not completely ignored in heav- 
en, where the angels are totally unconcerned 
about the personality of Abraham, Isaac, and 
Jacob, and see no difference between Jew and 
Gentile, but difference of human quality. The 
angelic idea, refusing in this manner to be de- 
termined to persons, makes the speech of the an- 
gels compared with ours unlimited and univer- 



36 "The Angels devoid 

sal." 1 " There is no will of good, nor any un- 
derstanding of truth, which attaches to the angel 
himself, but only to the Lord in him. The 
most celestial angel is in himself altogether false 
and evil : what is good and true in him, being 
his own not in reality but only apparently." 2 
"All good and truth is from the Lord, and what 
is the Lord's remains His in those who receive 
it; for it is Divine, and cannot become the 
property of any man. What is Divine may be 
in man, but not as his own or in his selfhood, 
for this is nothing but evil, and he consequent- 
ly who appropriates what is Divine to him- 
self defiles and profanes it. The Lord's divin- 
ity (in human nature) is exquisitely separated 
from man's selfhood, elevated above and never 
immersed in it." 3 This is doubtless why, ac- 
cording to another statement of Swedenborg, 
"there is no enforced or arbitrary authority ex- 
isting in heaven, since no angel in his heart ac- 
knowledges any one superior to himself but the 
Lord alone." 4 " Heaven is heaven from the 
Divine alone, he says. So much accordingly 
as the angels have in them of the Lord's Divine, 
so much they constitute heaven; but so much as 
they have of themselves in them, so much they 
do not constitute heaven" — but rather of course, 
its opposite. 5 

According to these statements heaven is any- 
thing but "a mutual admiration society," and 

1 Arc. Cel., 5225, 8343, 9007. 4 Apocalypse Explained, 735. 

2 Ibid., 633. 5 See Arc. Cel.,- 9479. 

3 Apocalypse Revealed, 758. 






of Personal Worth. 37 

angels the most celestial will prove very disa- 
greeable persons to many who now aspire to 
their company. But let us go on to cull a 
few more of these generous and humane para- 
graphs, with the hope that some one who has 
been deeply imbued with our prevalent man- 
worship, or current insanity in regard to the 
necessity of some sort of personal worth in 
man, before he can be entitled to expect the 
Divine favor, and been led by it to strain and 
puff himself out of all childlike innocence and 
honesty, in order to catch a breath of God's 
applause, may be arrested by them and recon- 
ducted into the ways of truth. 

" Every man, regenerate though he be, is such 
that unless the Lord withheld him from evils 
and falses, he would cast himself precipitately 
into hell ; and the very instant he is not with- 
held, he plunges headlong into it, as has been 
made known to me by actual experiences." 1 
" No one nowadays doubts that evils and falses 
in man are dispersed and abolished while he 
is regenerating, so that when he becomes re- 
generated, nothing of evil and falsity remains, 
but he is clean and righteous like one cleansed 
and washed with water. This however is 
utterly false. For no single evil or falsity 
in man can be so broken up as to be abol- 
ished, but on the contrary, whatsoever evil 
has been hereditarily derived to a person, or 
been actually contracted by him, remains; so 
that every man, even the regenerate man, is 

1 Arc. Cel., 789. 



38 The Jngeh devoid 

nothing but evil and falsity, as is shown to the 
life after death. The truth of this statement is 
demonstrable from the fact, that nothing of good 
or truth exists in man but from the Lord, and 
that all his evil and falsity are from selfhood ; 
so that every man, every spirit, yea every angel, 
if left in the least to themselves, would plunge 
spontaneously into hell. This is why in scrip- 
ture the heavens are said to be impure. The 
angels acknowledge this truth, and whoso re- 
fuses to acknowledge it is unfit for their society. 
It is God's mercy alone which emancipates 
them from evil; yea, which withdraws and with- 
holds them from hell, into which they of them- 
selves rush headlong." 1 

Again he says in the same remarkable repos- 
itory : " It has been proved to me by lively 
experience, that every man, spirit, and angel, 
viewed in himself, or as to his entire proprium, 
is the vilest excrement, and that if he were left 
to himself he would breathe only hatreds, re- 
venges, cruelties, and foulest adulteries. These 
things are his proprium and his will. This is 
evident to reflection from the fact, that man as 
he is born is viler than all beasts ; and when he 
grows up and becomes his own master, unless 
external bonds which are of the law, and the 
bonds he imposes upon himself in order to 
grow greatest and richest, prevented him, he 
would rush into every iniquity, nor ever rest 
until he had subjugated everybody else to him- 
self, and possessed himself of their substance, 

l Arc. Ccl., 868. 






of Personal Worth. 39 

showing no favor to any but those who should 
become his abject slaves. Such is the nature of 
every man, however ignorant he be of the fact 
in consequence of his want of power to do 
what he would like; but give him the power, 
and release him from the obligations of pru- 
dence, and his inclination would fall no whit 
behind his opportunity. The beasts are not so 
bad as this, for they are born into a certain order 
of nature. Those that are fierce and rapacious 
do indeed inflict injury upon others, but only 
from self-preservation; and when they devour 
others, it is to appease hunger, for when this is 
done they cease from violence." l 

Certainly these are anything but slipshod 
statements. They involve on their very face 
indeed a philosophy which no merely meta- 
physic wit has yet sounded; which, on the 
contrary, would seem to leave Schelling and 
Sir William Hamilton forever to bump their 
learned heads, without striking out a solitary 
spark available to human hope or progress. 

What, obviously, is the fundamental postu- 
late of this philosophy ? 

It is that man is in literal strictness a crea- 
ture of God, dependent every moment upon the 
Divine communication for all that he has and 
is and hopes to become. He is absolutely and 
at every moment void of life in himself, so that 
if the fulness of the creative bounty were sus- 
pended towards him for a moment, or if it were 
for an instant overclouded, he would at once 
cease to be. 

1 Arc. Cel., 987. 



40 Swedenborg's Statements imply 

Such is the fundamental postulate of this phi- 
losophy : but this would go but a little way 
to satisfy the mind, if this were all. For the 
reader would in that case reasonably ask : 
" Whence comes it, if this be the truth of things, 
that the appearance is so different ? If man be 
this abject creature of God, how has he self- 
hood, or a feeling of life in himself? How is 
it that he feels so self-sufficient, for example, as 
to be able to reason about the possibility of his 
never having been created, and to doubt the 
Divine existence? See the statue which I 
create. It is abjectly servile to my will, and 
has no capacity whatever to gainsay it. It ex- 
hibits no faintest show of life or consciousness. 
And is it conceivable that the creature of the 
Divine power should not be infinitely more 
dependent upon God, than any product of my 
power can be upon me ? How then shall we 
explain man's moral experience on the hy- 
pothesis of his unlimited creatureship ? How 
shall we account for his exuberant selfhood, 
freedom, conscious life, if he be the absolute 
creation you make him ? M 

It is clearly impossible to satisfy these reason- 
able demands, if we continue to conceive of 
creation as a physical act of God in time and 
space; if we do not at once begin to view it as 
a purely rational act, involving the most exqui- 
site adjustment of means to ends; or what is the 
same thing in other words, if we do not con- 
ceive of the natural creation as taking place 
altogether in the interests of a totally distinct 






a Profound Philosophy. 41 

and superior style of life. Morality is a purely 
rational fact. It supposes its subject to be a 
ratio, or mean, between two extremes : God and 
nature, infinite and finite, spirit and flesh. To 
attempt to account for moral consciousness then 
on physical principles purely, would be like at- 
tempting to account for a child by assigning it a 
mother and denying it a father. It is evident 
that we can explain no phenomenon of conscious- 
ness, if we allow its physical element to swamp 
or supersede its spiritual one. It is impossible 
in fact to justify a single breath of morality, 
unless you subordinate what is natural in the 
creature to what is spiritual, unless you make 
what gives it finiteness or identity serve what 
gives it infinitude or individuality. In short, 
our natural creation is not final, does not take 
place on its own behalf, but only in order to 
something else, which is our spiritual conjunc- 
tion or fellowship with God. As the Bible 
phrases it, we are created in order to be made 
or formed. " And God blessed the seventh 
day and sanctified it, because that in it he had 
rested from all his work which he had created 
to make." 1 And inasmuch as all spiritual con- 
junction or fellowship implies mutual action 
and reaction — reciprocal give and take — be- 
tween the parties to it, it is evident that man 
can become spiritually conjoined with God only 
in freedom, only so far forth as he is consciously 
self-prompted thereto, or feels an intelligent sym- 
pathy with the Divine name. 

1 Gen. ii. 3. 



42 Its Fundamental Notion 

Freedom or selfhood, then, is implied in God's 
creature, just as the foundation of a house is im- 
plied in its superstructure ; because the creature, 
being destined for spiritual conjunction with 
God, for the fellowship of his maker's perfec- 
tion, must of course first be to his own con- 
sciousness, or exist in himself, before he can be- 
come conjoined with God. I emphasize the 
word " implied" here, because I want the reader 
distinctly to understand the point involved, 
which is: that that most distinctive and charac- 
teristic force in our nature which we call free- 
dom, rationality, selfhood, the moral force in 
short, and upon which we are all so disposed to 
run riot, is not a finality; is by no means an 
absolute gift; but is on the contrary a most strict 
and perpetual Divine communication or permis- 
sion, in the interest exclusively of a very supe- 
rior spiritual and eternal end. This is the 
infirmity of all our ordinary traditional notions 
on the subject of creation, that man's selfhood 
or moral force, his freedom or rationality, is 
tacitly excepted from the Divine operation, and 
his mere passive or physical experience account- 
ed for. But clearly if I am an unlimited crea- 
ture of God, my most characteristic experience 
is precisely what that fact ought best to explain. 
If I am an indubitable creation of God's power, 
then whatsoever goes inmostly to constitute me 
to my own perception, must especially fall 
within that framework, and not outside of it ; 
must confess itself strictly incidental to- my 
creation, instead of accidental as we are inclined 






the Dependence of Morality. 43 

to regard it. I may feel myself to be my own 
master just as much as I please, and claim with 
pride the exclusive responsibility of my own 
actions. I may cherish such a feeling indeed of 
my own independence of any higher power than 
that I call Nature, as to entertain grave doubts 
of the Divine existence : but these facts should 
only illustrate not invalidate my alleged crea- 
tureship. Every legitimate hypothesis of my 
creatureship is bound to cover and account for 
all these apparently contradictory phenomena, 
under penalty of invalidating itself Let me 
rob my neighbor of his property to any extent, 
defame his character, betray his domestic peace, 
deprive him of life; in short, let me obscure the 
Divine image in my soul under any amount of 
turpitude: the reader has not the smallest right 
to go on affirming my creatureship, without at 
the least trying to explain these very ugly things 
by it. He may be scientifically incapable of 
doing so, but it is a manifest philosophic obli- 
gation upon him to make the attempt. For if 
God be truly my creator, it is my very self that 
he gives being to, my most distinctive character- 
istic and inseparable self: and every attempt 
consequently to postulate my creation, and at 
the same time exclude my moral history from 
it, confesses itself simply preposterous. 

Let my meaning be clearly understood. The 
moral experience of man has always been and 
still is the stumbling-block of Philosophy, be- 
cause Philosophy has not known how to bring 
it within creation, inasmuch as it regards crea- 



44 Its Fundamental Notion 

tion as a purely physical exploit of God's 
power, an event in time and space; and hence 
leaves the human mind or the moral realm of 
experience completely unhoused by it. Now I 
say that Philosophy is most inconsistent in this, 
because if I am a creature of God, if He gives 
me literally all the being I possess, Philosophy 
has no right to restrict His creative operation to 
the limits of my merely physical or passive per- 
sonality: it is bound to prove it equally energetic 
and absolute within the range of my moral or 
active subjectivity as well. It has no right to 
say that God possesses me ab extra exclusively: 
it is bound, if all my being derives from Him, to 
show that He possesses me also ab intra, I know 
very well- how contrary this is to established 
prejudice. The grand old religions of the world 
are running very low nowadays; have given 
place in fact to the emptiest scientific babble. 
The moral sphere of life consequently, the sphere 
of our felt freedom or selfhood, is everywhere 
getting to be regarded by insincere and specu- 
lative religionists as absolute and rightfully ex- 
empt from the Divine invasion. Morality, as 
interpreted by our cleverest and most admired 
theological empirics, means a capacity in its 
subject of absolute self-determination; of unde- 
rived power ; means the state of a man who not 
only in appearance but in reality is a law unto 
himself. No doubt the interests of our responsi- 
bility to God and the neighbor, when viewed in 
the letter or on the surface, do seem to justify 
this insane pretension, inasmuch as they require 



the Dependence of Morality, 45 

that our conduct should be visibly self-moved, 
or date from ourselves exclusively, to the denial 
of all outward constraint. But then the surface 
aspect of things is precisely what the philoso- 
pher disregards, being above all things careful 
to seize their substantial or spiritual import, 
which alone is conformable to absolute truth. 
At all events it is just this surface aspect of the 
case which Swedenborg proves to be eminently 
fallacious, in showing us that the apparent self- 
hood or freedom we have from nature, is nothing 
but an appearance, vouchsafed to us in the in- 
terest of a higher or spiritual evolution, and 
contingent upon a certain strict equilibrium 
which the Divine Providence maintains in our 
nature between the opposing poles of good and 
evil. 

Let me briefly illustrate the practical differ- 
ence on this point between Swedenborg and the 
popular theologians, by a familiar example. 

I tell a lie, perhaps to screen myself from 
some menaced blame or injury, perhaps to ad- 
vance myself at another's expense. Whatever 
be the motive of my action, I have an entire 
sense of freedom from constraint in doing it. 
So far as any feeling of coercion operates 
upon me to do it, I feel that I might refrain 
from doing it as well as not. In short, the de- 
termination of my action lies to my own con- 
sciousness wholly in myself. I actually debate 
whether to do it or not, and either deliberately 
conclude to do it, or else purposely leave my 
mind so un-made-up about it, as to render that 



46 Our Moral Force 

result very probable whenever the occasion to 
decide shall arise. 

Now the popular theologian looking at this 
experience would say, that my natural feeling 
of freedom in the premises, was the exact meas- 
ure of the spiritual truth; that I felt free, in other 
words, to tell the lie, because I absolutely was free. 
He sees that so far as appearances go I am free; 
that so far as man's judgment or my own con- 
sciousness is concerned, I acted under no con- 
straint ; and having no idea that natural appear- 
ances are only inversely and not directly as their 
spiritual realities, he concludes that my moral 
power, the power which I consciously have 
either to tell the lie or not to tell it, is all my 
own. my own absolutely, and independently of 
my relations to other beings. 

Swedenborg explodes this sensuous reasoning 
in toto. He denies that my natural feeling of 
freedom in the premises is any measure of the 
spiritual reality. He affirms, in short, that I 
feel free to do evil, and therefore charge myself 
with it, not by virtue of anything in myself, for 
in myself I am and can be nothing but a recip- 
ient; but altogether by virtue of an operation 
of God in the spiritual world, or the unseen 
depths of the human mind, so sharply separating 
good from evil, heaven from hell, and then so 
exquisitely balancing the one by the other, as to 
prevent any preponderant influx of either into 
nature, and enable Him to endow me conse- 
quently with a sense of freedom, a feeling of 
selfhood, so genial and exquisite that I cannot 



perpetually communicated. 47 

help appropriating it, or feeling it to be indeed 
bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, and 
foregoing everything for it. God gives me this 
selfhood or conscious freedom, this ability to 
discern for myself between good and evil, not 
absolutely or for its own sake, but in the inter- 
est of my immortal spiritual conjunction with 
Him. I can only become spiritually conjoined 
with him, as we have already seen, in freedom, 
or in so far as I am consciously self-prompted 
thereto; and He accordingly endows me with 
my natural selfhood or freedom, only that it 
may serve as the basis of this higher boon; or 
in order that I, knowing good and evil, may as 
of myself cleave to the one and forsake the other, 
and so come spiritually into such a relation of 
correspondence with His perfection, as that I 
shall eventually be quickened into the liveliest 
personal sympathy with, and most solicitous per- 
sonal aspiration towards, His fragrant and spot- 
less name. 

The difference, then, between Swedenborg 
and the popular religionists is, that the latter 
make the moral consciousness in man a finality, 
or its own end; so leaving the good and evil 
that are in human nature, or heaven and hell, 
totally unamenable to any higher or subsequent 
operation of the Divine power. According to 
Swedenborg, on the other hand, our moral his- 
tory is but a merciful Divine means to an infi- 
nitely superior Divine end in humanity, which 
is our spiritual conjunction, as a race, with God. 
Our moral experience is merely a provisional 



48 Our Moral Force 

basis or foundation in the individual bosom, for 
a stupendous spiritual edifice which the Divine 
wisdom is assiduously rearing in human nature 
itself And if we regard it accordingly not as 
being purely ministerial to this diviner style of 
manhood, but as magisterial in fact, and having 
a right to our unlimited allegiance, we shall be 
like a man who is so intent upon sinking the 
foundations of his house to the greatest possible 
depth, that he comes at last upon the elemental 
fires, or finds his ostentatious labor swallowed 
up of quicksands. 

In short, our ordinary cosmology accounts 
or professes to account for Nature, which is the 
bare skeleton of existence; but it leaves History 
which is the lifeblood and rounded flesh that 
clothe that skeleton with beauty, wholly lawless 
and accidental. Swedenborg, on the contrary, 
illustrates Nature by History, or makes the body 
of things rigidly authenticate their soul. This 
treatment converts creation from a mere ostenta- 
tious exhibition of unprincipled power, without 
rational beginning as without rational result, into 
an infinitely tender and orderly procedure of the 
eternal Love and Wisdom, in all the endlessly 
various but ineffably harmonious forms of hu- 
man nature. 

This is but a glimpse of Swedenborg's labor. 
Yet even this glimpse entitles us to expect of 
him a clear philosophic explication of the great 
mystery of creation: /. e. a doctrine upon that 
subject which shall appease every aspiration of 
the heart towards God, and every demand of the 



perpetually communicated. 49 

intellect thence engendered. The invincible 
witness of the heart towards God is, that he is 
infinite in love : 1. e. that His love for his crea- 
tures is wholly untainted by any regard for Him- 
self. It is the equally invincible witness of our 
intelligence that He is infinite in wisdom : /. e. 
that his ability to carry out his designs of love 
falls no whit behind his disposition. A doctrine 
of creation, therefore, which should practically 
affront either of these great witnesses, by affirm- 
ing a permanent imperfection in the creative 
work, or actual outcome of this infinite Love 
and Wisdom, would stamp itself unworthy of 
men's lasting respect. 



CHAPTER II. 

The profoundest of our sensuous judgments, 
and the basis of the religious instinct in us, is, 
that our natural force is final : that far from be- 
ing strictly incidental to a grander subsequent 
evolution of the Divine power in us, it is, on the 
contrary, its own end: thus that the pleasure and 
the pain, the health and the disease, the strength 
and the weakness, the growth and the decay, 
upon whose equilibrium our natural conscious- 
ness is contingent, are in themselves absolute 
goods and evils: to be received, the former with 
thankfulness, as a mark of the Divine favor; the 
latter with sorrow, as a mark of the Divine dis- 
pleasure. 

Christianity has done very much to soften the 
fierceness of this Pagan inheritance in our bo- 
soms, if not altogether to extinguish it. But 
the same prejudice in application to our moral 
instincts, still exists there unsuspected, awaiting 
the slow correction of science. Almost every 
one in Christendom, especially in literal or Eu- 
ropean Christendom, conceives that our moral 
judgments, our judgments of character, are a 
direct efflux of the Divine judgment : thus that 
where we see a difference of good and evil 
among men, God sees the same difference, only 



Moral Life in order to Spiritual 51 

in aggravated form; that where we approve 
the good man and condemn the evil one, He 
feels literally the same emotions in kind that 
we feel, only more intense in degree. I scarcely 
know an orthodox ecclesiastic who is not so 
content with feeding upon this windy fruit of 
"the tree of knowledge of good and evil," as 
virtually to agree with the old serpent in consid- 
ering that diet as the soul's best nutriment, infal- 
libly assimilating our intelligence to God's, in 
place of forever differencing it from His. 

Swedenborg effectually exposes this insanity, 
by proving that just as our physical experience 
has had no other end than to base or matriculate 
our moral manhood, so our moral experience in 
its turn has had no other end than to serve as a 
matrix or mould to our true spiritual manhood. 
He reduces the part which morality plays in the 
Divine administration to a strictly educative one; 
its whole office being to loosen nature's remorse- 
less grasp upon us, and so prepare us spiritually 
for the unimpeded Divine inhabitation. Noth- 
ing consequently can be more hurtful to the 
intellect than to confound the moral and spirit- 
ual consciousness in man ; or make that purely 
phenomenal freedom which distinguishes us nat- 
urally from the brute, take the place of that most 
real freedom which allies us spiritually with God. 
One is simply the badge of our natural dignity, 
of what forever separates us from the animal; 
the other is the mark of our individual spiritual 
culture. One merely stamps us as God's true 
creature among all lower creatures; the other 



52 Moral Life in order to Spiritual. 



pronounces us His children, redeemed from dis- 
tant creatureship into intimate sonship, by the 
frankest freest and most cordial participation of 
His spirit. 

The particular service then which Sweden- 
borg renders to Philosophy, consists in the com- 
plete elucidation he affords the moral instinct, as 
basing and alone basing the evolution of our 
spiritual destiny. Morality admits of no abso- 
lute justification. How can any mind of true 
reverence tolerate the conception of a creature 
of God, who is anything in-himself % For to 
be anything in himself, he must claim a power 
underived from God, and the pretension to such 
a power is fatal to creatureship. Accordingly, 
whenever a man attempts to vindicate morality 
unconditionally, he finds himself logically com- 
pelled to bring up in Atheism or Pantheism : at 
all events to deny creation in any intelligible 
sense of that word. 1 What justifies moral ex- 
istence and alone justifies it, is the use it sub- 
serves to an infinitely superior style of manhood: 
precisely as what justifies us in digging a subter- 
ranean foundation for our houses is, the use such 
foundation is calculated to promote to an edifice 
made up of light and air. 

Thus according to Swedenborg our moral 
history with all its tremendous issues of heaven 
and hell, falls within creation not outside of it : 



1 Dr. Bushnell hazards a very 
rash and even desperate solution 
of the difficulty, by making God 
to create a number of little gods 
instead of men : his idea of mo- 



rality being that it involves a par- 
ticipation of the Divine essence ! 
See " Nature and the Supernat- 
ural," passim. 



Kant and Swedenborg. 53 

that is to say, does not express the relation of 
the creature to the creator, but of the creature 
to himself. Unlike Kant Swedenborg restricts 
nature to a purely constitutive use, and denies 
her the least creative efficacy. Her total func- 
tion is to confer subjectivity not objectivity. She 
gives conscious existence or identity to her sub- 
jects, but has no power to give them unconscious 
being or individuality. Kant himself indeed 
allows that our knowledge of nature reaches only 
to what is constitutive and phenomenal of other 
existence in her ; but then he maintains that she 
possesses a latent noumenal or creative force in 
herself as well, insisting that the thing which ap- 
pears is never the veritable thing-in-itself, never 
the thing which really is. Swedenborg on the 
other hand affirms that the thing which appears 
is the veritable thing-in-itself; that phenomenon 
and noumenon are identical in other words; since 
the only selfhood or existence which is possible 
and proper to created things, must in the nature 
of the case be phenomenal not absolute. 

Why "in the nature of the case"? The an- 
swer is very obvious. 

We saw a while ago that the Divine end in 
creation is the eternal spiritual conjunction of 
the creature with Himself: this end being neces- 
sitated by the very infinitude of the Divine Love, 
which is so unalloyed by self-love as to be spon- 
taneously communicative of itself to others : i. e. 
creative. But what is other than God, what 
is alien to God, has and plainly can have no ab- 
solute existence, no existence in-itself ; but only 



54 Swedenborg's Doftrine of 

a phenomenal or apparent existence permitted 
in the interests of God's creative design. Thus 
much existence indeed — existence of this purely- 
phenomenal and permitted quality — is indispen- 
sable to it, because otherwise the creature could 
have no existence, no imaginable ground of pro- 
jection from God, nor consequently any claim to 
have been created by Him. The creature's nat- 
ural identity in short is the first interest, the fun- 
damental postulate, of his spiritual individuality. 
For clearly God does not create what is Himself, 
but only what is not Himself; what is alien to 
Himself; what indeed is intensely opposite and 
repugnant to Himself. And alienation from God, 
opposition to God, is never absolutely but only 
and at best phenomenally possible; being con- 
tingent upon the otherwise unimaginable depths 
of the creative mercy. 

Thus God's creature is bound first of all to exist 
phenomenally or to his own consciousness, before 
he can claim to exist absolutely; /. e. to God's 
own perception as well. But clearly this phe- 
nomenal existence is the only existence the crea- 
ture can claim to have in-himself: whatever 
other more real existence he has, must be not in 
himself but exclusively in God. This, briefly, is 
what I meant by saying that " in the nature of 
things " the only existence or selfhood possible 
to the creature is phenomenal not noumenal. 

In view of these considerations the reader 
will be able to anticipate the commanding light 
which they shed upon the nature of evil. For 
if the fundamental law of creation be what we 



the Origin of Evil. $$ 

have alleged, namely: that the creature have 
phenomenal or conscious selfhood, in order to 
base his subsequent spiritual conjunction with 
God: then it follows that his highest welfare 
must consist in his not being duped by this mere 
appearance, in his taking it at its actual worth 
as an appearance; and his deepest misery consist 
in his mistaking it for an absolute reality. His 
selfhood or conscious life in himself is indeed 
but the outward form of his inmost spiritual 
dependence upon God; so that if he allows it 
to degenerate into a sentiment of independence 
towards God, /. e. to become absolute, he falls 
incontinently into evil. 

Now this result is inevitable to the creature's 
inexperience : but Christianity teaches us that 
so far from regretting it, we should rejoice in it 
as furnishing the only fitting opportunity for the 
true manifestation of the Divine power towards 
us, as becoming able really to create us naturally, 
only by first redeeming us spiritually. Spiritual 
redemption, not physical creation, is the inmost 
splendor of the Divine name ; and he who has 
not learned thus much of Christianity, has a good 
deal yet to learn. Let me explain. 

What I say is : that inasmuch as the senti- 
ment of selfhood or freedom is instinctive to 
the human bosom, being a preliminary exigency 
of our spiritual formation in the Divine image, 
it remains innocent only so long as it is an in- 
stinct, and does not assume to dominate the con- 
sciousness : that is, only so long as the race is 
in the infancy of its development. While the 



56 Swedenborg's Dofirine of 

race is still in infantile conditions, and has not 
come to scientific consciousness, the conscious- 
ness of its destined power over nature, the senti- 
ment of selfhood or freedom in its bosom is 
but another name for the sentiment of its de- 
pendence upon God : and a tender religious 
awe consequently hallows the Divine name to 
its bosom, just as a feeling of respect and affec- 
tion hallows a parent's name to a child. Un- 
doubtedly this awe would soon degenerate into 
servile superstition (witness the heathen nations), 
unless the mind of the race grew by experience, 
by the gradual conquest of nature; unless, in 
other words, it became scientifically enlarged : 
just as the child's habitual reverence for the 
parent would degenerate into chronic imbecility, 
if the child should not eventually grow to the 
parent's intellectual stature. The growth of 
the mind, accordingly, out of its purely instinct- 
ual beginnings into pronounced scientific form 
and order, is inevitable, because necessary to its 
eventual philosophic sanity, or complete fellow- 
ship with God. 

But now I say only what is known to the 
experience of every reader, when I say that the 
child as he grows to man's estate and becomes 
qualified himself to wield the paternal inherit- 
ance, puts off to his own observation the 
innocence and docility which marked his in- 
fancy, the ready unquestioning obedience he 
exhibited to the paternal word, the tender con- 
fiding reverence he felt for the paternal mind 
and character. He now wishes to be wise, not 



the Origin of Evil. 57 

from his father but from himself; and good, no 
longer from outward tuition or constraint, but 
from his own prompting, from a sense of what 
is due exclusively to his own personal dignity. 
It is the rise of a practically healthful scepticism 
or Protestantism in the soul ; a needful insurrec- 
tion against all purely external or arbitrary au- 
thority. So precisely does it fare with the 
analogous history of the race, or the associated 
consciousness of man. Its infantile intelligence 
also puts on erelong the characters of adoles- 
cence and manhood. As its power over nature 
widens, as its passional and intellectual wants 
stimulate and develop its active powers, it looks 
up less reverently to heaven, and learns to con- 
fide more fully upon itself, upon what it feels and 
hence supposes to be its own absolute resources; 
the tender religious awe of its earlier days melt- 
ing thus infallibly into the scientific pride and 
power of its majority. 

This advancing scientific consciousness of the 
race has always been regarded as a fallen state 
of the mind ; but it is not so absolutely ; it is 
so only relatively to the mental condition from 
which it departs. Thus measured it is no doubt 
a fall. If religion is bound to undergo the slow 
sepulture of science, with no hope of any subse- 
quent resurrection in living or glorified form : if, 
in other words, science constitute the perfected 
form of the mind, the full measure of its expan- 
sibility : I, for one at least, have no hesitation in 
saying that it would have been better for the 
race to have remained to this day in its cradle, 



58 Swedenborg's Dottrine of 

hearkening to the inspiration of naiad and dryad, 
of sea-nymph and of faun, than to have come 
out of it only to find its endless spiritual capac- 
ities, its capacities of spontaneous action, hope- 
lessly stranded upon these barren rocks of science, 
ruthlessly imprisoned in her lifeless laws or gen- 
eralizations. For if the difference between the 
purely religious or instinctual consciousness of 
the race and its growing scientific consciousness, 
be, as we have seen, the difference between 
the child and the youth, between diffidence and 
self-confidence; then it is extremely easy still 
further to see, that this subtle spiritual change 
which creeps over the mind of the race simply 
by virtue of its increasing acquaintance with 
itself, with its own God-given powers, can only 
deepen as time rolls on, until the mind becomes 
confirmed at last in all manner of pride and vul- 
gar self-assertion: until its infantile and innocent 
sentiment of freedom, becomes hardened into 
one of complete unhesitating and blatant inde- 
pendence. 

But there is no need to estimate the change 
exclusively in this aspect, that is, in its relation 
to the mental condition out of which it springs. 
We must view it in relation to the mental con- 
dition in which it issues or brings up ; and here 
we shall see that what men have called a fall, is 
really a rise. For the object of the Divine 
Providence having been to secure man's cordial 
fellowship with Himself, who is infinite Love, 
love without any limitation of self-love, this ob- 
ject could only be attained empirically; that is, 



the Origin of Evil 59 

by the creature undergoing in his own proper 
experience such a sickening conviction of the 
evils wrapped up in an unlimited abandonment 
to self, as would make him heartily ashamed of 
himself, and lead him to seek purification from 
God. The experience of evil accordingly, 
which has been inseparable from our rational 
expansion, is strictly tributary in the Divine 
wisdom to a good which otherwise would never 
have dawned upon us; a spontaneous good, as 
much higher than the merely instinctual good 
which it displaces or rather exalts to a higher 
power, as the tried wisdom of the mature man 
is higher than the tender promise of childhood. 
This, briefly stated, is Swedenborg's way of 
dealing with the problem of evil; and I for my 
part cannot help considering it a very satisfactory 
way, until I am shown a better. It has at least 
this commanding philosophic advantage over 
every other suggestion I have met with on the 
subject, that it makes evil a perfectly intelligible 
incident, no longer a wholly mysterious accident, 
of our historic progress : so leaving it to under- 
go whatever healing modification the normal 
issues of that progress may engender. In other 
words it relegates the origin of evil away back 
to the instinttual realm of life ; and inasmuch as 
all our instincts are themselves utterly servile to 
the needs successively of our voluntary and 
spontaneous life, of our moral and aesthetic cul- 
ture, so it may fairly be presumed that any evil 
which these instincts involve will ultimately be 
found to have been itself most strictly tributary 



60 His Sincere Testimony 

to a good in human nature so Divine, that the 
bare conception of it would have been otherwise 
impossible. 

This however is but an episode. I introduced 
it only to illustrate by a signal instance the power 
which Swedenborg's view of our natural phe- 
nomenality has, to shed light upon the most in- 
tricate problems of human origin and destiny : 
and so engage my reader's attention to what I 
have further to say. What I want my reader to 
observe is the sincere emphasis which Sweden- 
borg's doctrine of Nature puts upon the actual 
truth of creation ; the fidelity with which he 
insists upon man's being in literal strictness a 
creature of God, and therefore absolutely void 
of being-in-himself. This fact of his creature- 
ship makes it impossible for him to claim any- 
thing more than a phenomenal selfhood or 
consciousness, without blinding himself intel- 
lectually to the creative goodness and truth. If 
he be by nature an abject and total dependent 
upon God, he is evidently unentitled to selfhood 
or personal consciousness save by a constant Di- 
vine communication ; save by a ceaseless Divine 
permission. And if accordingly he comes to view 
the truth of the case differently: if he so reckon 
upon his felt absoluteness or self-sufficiency as 
to attribute good and evil to himself: it will 
be impossible to prevent him tumbling inconti- 
nently into every baleful illusion of pride, and 
to that extent excluding himself inwardly or 
spiritually from God's peace and purity. 

Thus the Bible informs us in mystical phrase, 






to the actuality of Creation. 61 

that man instinctively feels that " it is not good 
for him to be alone : " /. e. to be without self- 
hood, without the faculty and the dignity of fa- 
thering his own action. In other words man 
tends inevitably and innocently to selfhood, tends 
to feeling himself the source of his own affection 
and thought and power. And God mercifully 
accommodates Himself to this infallible instinct 
of the creature, in providing him, as the mysti- 
cal record further alleges, "a help meet for him:" 
i. e. permits him to realize selfhood and bring 
forth from it whatsoever fruit it is capable of 
yielding. But then the Divine Providence thus 
authenticates the natural instinct of the creature 
not absolutely or unconditionally, but exclusive- 
ly in the interest of the latter's eventual and per- 
fect spiritual conjunction with Himself. He 
authenticates this instinctive yearning in the 
creature after selfhood, in order that the latter, 
being thus taught how stupid and vile he is in 
himself or intrinsically and apart from the Di- 
vine conjunction, may effectually aspire to the 
knowledge and obedience of those laws of Di- 
vine order which alone give him rest. In other 
words He gives the creature natural selfhood, or 
the feeling of being his own life, only in order 
that the creature, knowing as of himself what he 
is by uncreation, so to speak, or natural disjunc- 
tion with God, may equally as of himself incline 
to that spiritual conjunction with Him which 
alone is life. 

Nothing can be more clear than that the im- 
mense mercy with which the Divine Love in- 



62 His Sincere Testimony 

wardly vivifies and fills out this illusion on man's 
part, does not affect its essential nature, does not 
make it any less an illusion, does not convert it 
into an absolute and unqualified reality. If self- 
hood, being an illusion so grateful to the natural 
heart, is taken advantage of by the Divine wis- 
dom in order to bring about a spiritual elevation 
of the creature which otherwise would have 
been both unattainable and inconceivable : that 
fact must not blind us to its exact character as an 
illusion, nor embolden us to argue from it to the 
true spiritual relation between creator and crea- 
ture. We may indeed pardon this fatuity in 
uninstructed minds; but what shall we say of 
labored systems of Theology and Philosophy, 
which assume the unconditional veracity of the 
moral sentiment as their base, and construct a 
cosmology upon the ground not merely of the 
creature's seeming — but of his real — indepen- 
dence of the creator? Yet this is the fatal 
dry-rot which has laid low every edifice reared 
by Philosophy since the beginning of history. 
Idealism is only a potent testimony to the ex- 
istence of the fatality: it furnishes no remedy 
against it. The fact is Idealism does not con- 
front the philosophic problem : it only evades it. 
The whole problem of Philosophy is to vindi- 
cate the actual truth of creation, by reconciling 
the freedom of the creature with his dependence 
upon the creator ; or harmonizing the apparent 
absoluteness of man with the real absoluteness 
from which he all the while confessedly derives. 
And the way Idealism takes to solve the prob- 



to the attuality of Creation. 63 

lem, is by vacating it of substance. It vindi- 
cates creation by denying it any actuality ; or 
reconciles man and God, creature and creator, 
finite and infinite, phenomenal and absolute, sim- 
ply by confounding them : i. e. by making the 
created consciousness a transient form or mould 
of the uncreated. 

Swedenborg is the first man, so far as I am 
aware, in the literary history of the world, who 
has put a decisive stop to this philosophic child's- 
play. He shows with commanding evidence 
that the selfhood of man is a reality only in 
God and not out of Him; and that there is no 
need accordingly to sacrifice either element of 
the equation, in order to maintain the integrity 
of the other. He demonstrates with such over- 
powering lustre the veritable infinitude of the 
Divine resources, that this duality of creature 
and creator which Philosophy has always found 
so paradoxical, becomes henceforth common- 
place and obligatory ; so that I at least do not 
hesitate to avow my conviction that he alone 
has given true body to Philosophy, and put her 
at last upon a career of literally endless prosper- 

fry- 

I said just now that Swedenborg satisfies the 
utmost need of Philosophy, by showing us that 
the selfhood of man is a reality only in God and 
not out of Him, as our sensuous theologies have 
hitherto reported. What I mean by this state- 
ment is, evidently, that Swedenborg gives such 
a surprising reality to the creative Love — so 
avouches its rational infinitude or perfection — 



64 Infinite Love necessarily Creative. 

that we instantly see man's selfhood or freedom, 
with all those infamies that attach to its fullest 
expansion, and forcibly disjoin him to his own 
consciousness from God, completely explained and 
accounted for ; and consequently find ourselves 
acknowledging creation no longer as a stupid 
intellectual problem, but as an irresistible postu- 
late of the heart. Love is thus the final word, 
the grand unuttered secret of Philosophy: infi- 
nite Love; a love so perfect, so untainted with 
self-love as to be of necessity creative : /. *., in- 
vincibly bent upon communicating its own un- 
stinted power and bliss to what is not itself, to 
what indeed is the exact and total opposite of 
itself. 

But we shall best do justice to Swedenborg, 
and put ourselves in the fittest attitude to esti- 
mate his great services to Philosophy, if we first 
of all bestow a cursory glance upon the very 
loose state of things, intellectually viewed, which 
under the name of religion, and the science 
thence derived, constitutes the popular culture 
of Christendom. Let us first glance at those 
insufficiencies in the strictly religious sphere of 
thought, which call so loudly for some authori- 
tative doctrine of Nature. Afterwards we shall 
be able to estimate those confessed scientific dis- 
abilities under which what is called Philosophy 
now labors. 



CHAPTER III. 

The scientific difficulties which beset Natu- 
ral Religion, the notoriously endless embarrass- 
ments it offers the intellect, reflect the native 
poverty of our understanding in Divine things, 
grow out of the habit we have of regarding the 
natural sphere of creation as final. It is this 
futile habit of mind which makes us look upon 
the sacred writings as a mine of literal historic 
information merely, and not as a marvellous 
veiling over or clouding of purely spiritual 
truth, in accommodation to the needs of our 
grossly sensual understanding. 

For example : the opening chapters of Gene- 
sis report the work of creation as proceeding 
from the great orbs of space, through the succes- 
sive orders of vegetable and animal existence, 
until it attains its full rich diapason in man: 
thus presenting all the things of nature as col- 
lated into and culminating in the human form, 
which in point of instinct or natural force is the 
feeblest and most contemptible of all forms, by 
way of symbolizing to our apprehension the 
great spiritual verity of the Lord or Divine 
Natural Humanity, as alone adequate to ac- 
count for the majesty and mystery of life. 

Now natural religion degrades this superb 

5 



66 How the Letter of Revelation 

imagery so rich in philosophic significance, into 
a narrative of so many literal physical exploits 
of God accomplished in space and time. 

So also when the Scripture, having thus pos- 
ited man as the consummation of nature's forms, 
goes on to represent his dawning moral con- 
sciousness under the image of a woman, fashioned 
out of his own substance while he sleeps, natural 
religion does not hesitate to transmute this per- 
fectly intelligible symbol of the gradual unsus- 
pected rise of selfhood in man, into a perfectly 
unintelligible historic fact; into a perfectly in- 
credible physical procedure of God, revolting 
alike to truth and decency. 

In like manner again when the sacred narra- 
tive proceeds to symbolize the dawn of spirit- 
ual life in man, or the access of conscience, 
resulting from his discovery of the profound 
inward destitution which underlies his fair out- 
ward seeming, under the image of " eating of a 
tree called the tree of the knowledge of good 
and evil : " * the carnal understanding just as 
little stickles to sink this sublime philosophic 
lesson into the stupid personal fact of Adam's 
actual lapse from the Divine favor and his con- 
sequent subjection to death temporal and eter- 
nal at the Divine hands : thus reducing the high 
and holy Name to a level with our own charac- 
teristic littleness and petulance. And finally it 

1 " And when the woman saw guided exclusively or confiding 

that the tree was good for food, in his own wisdom rather than 

etc., she took of the fruit, and the Divine, clasps the shadow 

gave also to her husband, and he of truth to his bosom not the 

did eat : " i. e., man being self- substance. 



degrades its Spiritual Contents. 67 

alleges the great verity of the Incarnation, not 
by any means as the sole interior life and sub- 
stance of creation, but as a purely empirical 
event in the Divine administration, designed to 
recall creation to its moorings after it had some- 
how unaccountably gone adrift in this exqui- 
sitely absurd and imbecile personality of Adam : 
precisely as if God were some unskilful work- 
man, who is obliged to mend his work immedi- 
ately that he has dismissed it from his hands as 
" all very good." 

The outrage offered to the reason by this 
childish dogmatism, is obviously insurmount- 
able. For if the being whom God creates be 
literally capable of going astray, the discredit of 
such a capacity must attach exclusively to the 
Divine name. If God give being to a creature, 
and this creature keep not the estate in which 
he was created, then the inference is not to be 
avoided, that the creative power itself and atone 
is at fault : that it is by no means an infinite 
power as we had fondly believed : that it is so 
far in fact from being infinite, that its limitation 
proceeds from its own absolute creature : which is 
probably the baldest absurdity, the most crying 
contradiction, ever offered to the reason since 
the world has stood. 

Of course if I make a statue of Apollo, and 
the work confess itself a failure, you would say 
the failure was due either on the one hand to 
my want of genius to conceive, or my want of 
skill to execute, so grand a work : or else on 
the other hand to some latent obduracy of my 



68 How the Letter of Revelation 

material, which no genius could anticipate and 
no skill overcome. 

But this alternative is wholly lacking in the 
catastrophe imagined by orthodoxy. Orthodoxy 
alleges that God makes all things out of noth- 
ing, out of absolutely no material whatever; so 
that if they turn out ill, the responsibility of 
their aberration in no way attaches to them- 
selves : for by the hypothesis they have no 
selfhood or character but what God imposes 
upon them, being summoned into instant con- 
sciousness by the creative fiat : and so attaches 
wholly to their maker. The orthodox concep- 
tion is that the creature is formed out of abso- 
lutely nothing, and hence is utterly destitute of 
subjective force or selfhood apart from his ob- 
jective being: so that any evil which may ap- 
pear in him attributes itself instantly to the 
creator, confesses itself exclusively due either to 
His original want of genius to conceive, or His 
original want of skill to execute, a perfect work : 
in short, to some defect in the creative love or 
wisdom, or both. 

The mother fallacy which breeds all these 
petty fallacies in the popular understanding, con- 
sists in attempting to conceive of an infinite 
power acting finitely, or under the limitations 
of space and time. Natural religion conceives 
that there was originally a space where, and a 
time when, creation was not. It conceives ac- 
cordingly that these two great idle wildernesses 
of time and space were inhabited by a mute 
inactive Deity alone ; and that this extraordinary 



degrades its Spiritual Contents. 69 

Deity, tired at last of slumbering in eternal sloth, 
sent forth a great creative shout, or succession 
of shouts, which made the existing cosmos sud- 
denly appear as if it had always been. 

Even if we admit this hypothesis, creation 
turns out a vastly greater boon to the creator 
than it does to the creature. Whatever benevo- 
lence such a creation may be argued to involve 
to the creature, it unquestionably argues much 
more to the creator himself. For who can 
fancy the ghastly solitude to which, for so many 
orthodox eternities, the creator's imputed inac- 
tivity had condemned Him, without a shudder 
of boundless horror ? And who therefore can 
perceive this hideous solitude suddenly blossom 
into the profusest society, without feeling that 
he who alone had encountered the past desola- 
tion, was infinitely more to be felicitated upon 
the present surprising transformation, than they 
who were to have only an ex post faffio knowl- 
edge of it ? 

But the whole conception is boundlessly and 
bewilderingly absurd ; absurd enough to nourish 
a standing army of famished Tom Paines into 
annual fatness. There were no time and space 
prior to creation, simply because time and space 
are experiences of the finite mind, of the created 
consciousness exclusively, and so fall within 
creation not outside of it. They are constitu- 
tionally involved in all purely conscious or sub- 
jective existence ; time having no meaning save 
to furnish a rational or relative basis — space 
a sensible or finite basis — to such existence. 



70 Time and Space Constitutional 

Without time I should have no logical exist- 
ence, or capacity of thought; without space, 
no sensitive existence, or capacity of afFection. 
Were it not for the logical substance or back- 
ground which time furnishes to the events of 
history, history would not exist to me. Were 
it not for the sensible substance or background 
which space communicates to the objects of na- 
ture, nature herself would not exist to me. In 
short the very stuff of my intellect and sensibil- 
ity is furnished by space and time, so that in 
proportion as you abstract them you reduce me 
to blank unconsciousness or non-existence. Thus 
time and space do not exist in themselves (or 
apart from the mind), but only relatively to the 
human subject; the all of time representing the 
bounds, thus the integrity, of human thought ; 
the all of space the bounds, thus the integrity, 
of human passion : so both alike compelling, 
the one all history, the other all existence, within 
the strictest limits of the human form, within the 
straitest dimensions of the human conscious- 
ness. 

We do not see Time and Space to be what 
they really are, mere constitutional conditions 
of our consciousness : and we do not see Nature 
consequently to be what she really is, nothing 
more and nothing less than the contents of our 
universal subjectivity, made visible and objective 
to the individual or derivative subject: because 
we have no belief in the real universality of con- 
sciousness, but only in its phenomenal individu- 
ality ; because, in other words, our reason is still 



Conditions of our Consciousness. 71 

dominated by sense, our science still swamped 
in imagination. A spiritual intelligence, which 
means one no longer dominated but on the con- 
trary completely served by sense, perceives time 
and space as embodying the true and entire 
mental subjectivity of the race ; and as having 
therefore no objective truth or validity save to 
an inferior or finite and derivative subjetlivity. 
Every enlightened person perceives the true sub- 
stances of the universe to be exclusively human 
or spiritual, as goodness and truth, love and wis- 
dom ; and regards time and space as mere sen- 
suous forms or appearances of these realities, 
accommodated to the needs of our infantile un- 
derstanding, by dimly imaging or symbolizing 
verities which it is as yet too gross to appre- 
hend. Of course the young must be talked to 
as if creation took place in space and time, /. e. 
as if it were a purely physical, and not a purely 
spiritual, exertion of Divine power. Because 
as they are still under the dominion of sense and 
incapable of spiritual insight, we must either 
clothe our instruction in parables of sensuous 
imagery, or else give up instructing them alto- 
gether. But our orthodox theologians are men 
in understanding, being able to discern spiritual 
truth or substance in its own light. They there- 
fore should be ashamed to regard creation as a 
work effected by God in space and time; and 
should insist upon regarding it exclusively in the 
light shed upon it by the great truth — to which 
moreover they profess so much allegiance — of 
the Incarnation; i. e. as a work Divinely 



72 Natural Religion affronts the Heart 

wrought within the strictest limits of human 
nature, or the bosom of universal man. 

After all however the decisive reprobation 
which the traditional cosmology invites, is phil- 
osophic rather than scientific ; being based more 
upon the outrage it offers the heart than that 
which it offers the reason. Natural religion 
represents creation as an act of pure will on 
God's part, a movement of simple caprice, in- 
volving therefore not one particle of the honest 
labor and sweat which go to the execution of 
any humane enterprise : say, the growing or the 
making or the baking of a loaf of bread : and 
consequently forbidding us to feel a single spon- 
taneous emotion of gratitude or admiration tow- 
ards Him. I cannot possibly feel grateful to 
any one for giving me what it costs him nothing 
to give; what he may just as easily give as not. 
Nor can I honestly admire any being for doing 
what there is no opposition to his doing; my 
just admiration of any work being strictly pro- 
portionate to my lively appreciation of the ob- 
stacles involved in its execution. The human 
mind in fact is constitutionally incapable of ac- 
knowledging any excellence which is not of its 
own order or essentially human ; that is to say, 
which does not express in some manner the vital 
selfhood, the inmost heart, of its subject. I can 
perfectly understand and appreciate human ac- 
tion, action which proceeds from within out- 
wardly, or which, taking its rise in some want 
of the heart, flows down through the channel 
of the understanding, into appropriate word or 



even more than the Head. 73 

deed. Any thing lower than this is vegetable 
growth or animal motion, and is unworthy the 
name of human action. And any thing in the 
way of action higher than this is to our faculties 
simply inconceivable and incredible. 

Accordingly when orthodoxy commends God, 
the universal creator, to our rational reverence 
and affection, under the guise of a great melo- 
dramatic being so essentially heartless as to live 
for untold eternities without feeling any desire 
for companionship ; so essentially irrational that 
it cost him no effort of thought to summon the 
universe into absolute being : I repugn the in- 
struction as converting the creative virtue into 
mere personal whim or caprice, unworthy of a 
reasonable man's respect. I will not acknowl- 
edge a God so void of human worth ; so every 
way level to the character of a mere ostentatious 
showman or conjuror. It is just such a childish 
caricature of Deity as Byron might paint to 
match those childish caricatures of manhood 
with which his purulent imagination runs riot. 
I am constrained by every inspiration of true 
manhood to demand for my worship a perfectly 
human Deity; that is to say, a Deity who is so 
intent upon rescuing every creature He has made 
from the everlasting death and damnation he 
bears about in himself as finitely constituted, as 
not to shrink if need be from humbling Him- 
self to every patient form of ignominy, and 
feeding contentedly year in and year out, cen- 
tury after century, and millennium after millen- 
nium, upon the literal breath of our self-righteous 



74 The Divine Perfection 

contempt. In short I hold the only Deity- 
worthy a human being's worship to be the God 
and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ; to be the 
Divinity revealed in that perfect Humanity; a 
Divinity so incapable of all selfish regards, so 
poor in every sentiment and resource of personal 
pride, as eternally to hide Himself under the 
natural conceit and tyranny and lust of His own 
creatures, if thereby He may spiritually woo 
and win them to their immortal blessedness, in 
the free participation of His infinite goodness 
wisdom and power. 

Surely there is nothing in this statement which 
my reader's intelligence is not prepared to ratify. 
No one of my readers is capable of feeling the 
least respect for an idle God, any more than for 
an idle man. Every one respects labor; every 
one respects the man who does something more 
to vindicate his human quality, than just live 
upon his inheritance, or accumulated ancestral 
fat. And every one despises idleness ; every one 
despises the man, who, being endowed as every 
man is by his maker with one talent or two tal- 
ents or ten talents as the case may be, yet buries 
this Divine endowment in a napkin instead of 
putting it out to profitable use. And the ground 
upon which these judgments proceed, is suffi- 
ciently obvious. It is that our sentiment of 
human worth is violated, when we see one's 
strictly original or spiritual force, one's God- 
given self left out of one's life ; when we see a 
man content like a pig to live and die as pas- 
sively as he was begotten and born ; content 



is eminently Human, J$ 

to wear the livery of his splendid but tyrannous 
organization, instead of compelling that organ- 
ization into the unstinted service of his own in- 
effable spiritual needs. 

The natural inheritance of every one who is 
capable of spiritual life, is an unsubdued forest 
where the wolf howls and every obscene bird 
of night chatters ; so that his very manhood is 
contingent upon his subduing this inheritance 
to light and air, and making it yield, instead of 
its wild and poisonous undergrowths, every fruit 
good for food. Every man who has reached 
even his intellectual teens begins to suspect this; 
begins to suspect that life is no farce ; that it is 
not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and 
fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest 
tragic depths. All that is distinctive in human 
culture betrays an ever present conflict between 
the inner and outer life, between the private and 
public soul, and exhibits in itself that conflict 
reconciled. Whatsoever is noblest in human 
character, best in human action, most permanent 
in human achievement, most renowned in art, 
tells only of obstacles overcome, of difficulties 
toilsomely vanquished, in short of hell patiently 
subjugated to heaven, or evil reconciled to good, 
in some higher neutral and therefore positive 
quantity which men would never have otherwise 
divined. Even the least human of our endow- 
ments which is visible beauty, beauty that the 
senses can measure, disdains a passive genesis, 
proclaims itself the immediate offspring of a mar- 
riage between inward soul and outward body. 



76 The Divine Perfection 

An exquisitely regular face is not apt to be an 
interesting one, because the mere mechanics of 
beauty are almost sure to prevail in it over the 
dynamics, over the free breezy play of soul 
which gives that mechanism life and puts it in 
exhilarating motion. It is the gaunt preliminary 
framework of the house, rather than the sunny 
completed house itself. It is the skeleton of 
beauty without the warm blood and rounded 
flesh which alone make the skeleton presentable. 
Indeed our experience often witnesses that the 
most victorious beauty to the heart, rises sheer 
out of the lap of ugliness, exhibits the rich ex- 
pressive soul giving endless aggrandizement to 
the poor penurious body. 

But I have no need to heap up illustrations 
of my position, since my reader knows as well 
as I that nothing turns out permanently valuable 
either in character or in performance, which it does 
not cost blood of the mind or blood of the body 
to produce. I only want in fact to signalize to 
the reader's mind this indisputable quality of hu- 
man worth, the highest worth we recognize, in 
order to claim for Deity the actual perfection of 
such worth ; in order to show in other words 
that such being our most characteristic virtue as 
spiritually conjoined with God, namely, to disre- 
gard self, or freely consume it in our devotion to 
truth and beauty : such must be the characteristic 
perfection of our creative source : under penalty 
of the creature having failed to image his creator. 
If, as the good book avers, the blood constitute 
the life ; if, in other words man is pronounced 



is eminently Human. 77 

man by the supremacy of his heart to his head, 
or his power of self-abandonment to what is not 
himself: then God as being the height of all 
character, must be the essential perfection of 
heart, the absolute infinitude of love : /. e. must 
be creative. For this is the essential implication 
of an infinite love, that it have so little regard for 
self as of necessity to alienate, or communicate 
to another, what is its own ; as eternally to make 
itself over in fact to what is not itself, to what 
indeed is diametrically hostile to itself. 



CHAPTER IV. 

Now it is just this essentially creative aspect 
of the Divine perfection, just this very infinitude 
of the Divine Love, regarded not as a passive 
but as an active quantity; not as an idle orna- 
mental fixture of the Divine name, but as the 
actual working-force of all the effects of the 
universe, turning every thing into miracle: which 
Natural Religion blinks wholly out of sight, 
and which Revelation alone discloses to philo- 
sophic recognition. Revelation makes creation, 
as contradistinguished from redemption, a purely 
objective work of God, consisting in such a com- 
plete surrender of Himself to the creature, as that 
the total honor and glory of His name shall be 
submerged, and nothing emerge but the bound- 
less pride of the human heart, and the boundless 
folly of the human mind. And clearly Philos- 
ophy regarded as the exponent of creation, as 
the voucher of the Infinite and Absolute in the 
finite and relative, is deaf to any lower inspira- 
tion than this. Not alone Philosophy indeed, 
but common sense, prescribes that the creature, 
simply because he is a creature, /. e. another than 
God, must be in himself or subjectively consid- 
ered, the total unflinching and intense opposite 
of God. His very nature as a creature, his 



The Divine Humiliation. 79 

intrinsic aptitude, is death ; just as that of his 
creator is life. In this state of things, how shall 
he ever become j^-conscious, unless this very 
death which he is in himself, or naturally and 
apart from the creator, become organized in 
living form, in forms at all events of quasi or 
phenomenal life : unless in other words the cre- 
ator condescend to the native limitations of the 
creature, and give him subjective or conscious be- 
ing, by Himself unstintedly quickening all his 
intrinsic ignorance poverty and imbecility % 

The creature as such must be, in himself or 
naturally, the exact inversion of what the cre- 
ator is in Himself; impotent where He is omnip- 
otent, ignorant where He is omniscient, replete 
with evil where He is perfect in good : the ex- 
act office of the creative substance 01 energy 
being to make this natural wilderness of the 
creature the blossoming and fruitful garden of 
His own power and wisdom and goodness. 
The indispensable condition of the creature's 
self-consciousness is that the creator actually 
come down to his level, by organizing his endless 
natural want, or quickening it with His own 
deathless substance. The creator must not 
merely intellectually acquiesce in this natural 
infirmity, this intrinsic death or destitution of 
the creature, as the creature's rightful and in- 
alienable heritage, as in fact the sole inexpugna- 
ble basis of his identity: He must also cordial- 
ly accept it as the only possible basis of His own 
redemptive exploits, the only and all-sufficient ar- 
gument and opportunity of His own matchless 



80 The Creature must necessarily 

power and wisdom. Creation would be a mani- 
fest contradiction on any lower terms. Were 
the creature good in himself and not evil; were 
he naturally like God in place of being wholly 
unlike Him; then he would be God and not 
himself: for what is good in itself, or what of 
its own nature is like God, is God, and cannot 
therefore be created. Thus the fundamental 
condition of a true creation is, that it first of 
all permit the creature to expand to the fullest 
extent of his native or intrinsic worthlessness ; 
that it make him perfectly cognizant in other 
words of his essential imbecility and evil. We 
should otherwise lack every conceivable guaran- 
tee of the validity of creation; because in that 
case the creature would remain forever destitute 
of true or genuine self-consciousness, consequent- 
ly of every thing which could possibly separate 
him from Deity. In short whatever is logic- 
ally implied in his nature as a created or finite 
being, must come to consciousness within him 
so as really to constitute him to his own intelli- 
gence ; otherwise he will never get the slightest 
projection from his creative source : /. e. the 
slightest experience of himself: and conse- 
quently far from being a man, he will not even 
be a mineral. The very infinitude of the Di- 
vine power prevents Him giving being to the 
creature without the implication of an organized 
natural selfhood ; the actuality of the creation 
bearing the strictest ratio to the validity of this 
selfhood; /. e. being contingent upon the crea- 
ture freely exhibiting in himself the exact total 



antagonize the Creative Perfection. 81 

and uncompromising opposite of every Divine 
perfection. 

Such undeniably is the limitation which the 
creature imposes upon the creative power. And 
one sees at a glance that the limitation is fatal, 
unless the creator possess really infinite resources. 
To make creation at all conceivable the creator 
must be animated by a love without limit to the 
creature : for how can we conceive of a finite 
love communicating itself to what is intrinsically 
hostile or repugnant to itself? Finite love is 
self-love; since nothing limits the love we bear 
to others but the love we bear ourselves ; and if 
consequently there were the least taint of self- 
love in the creator, creation would have been 
impossible. For the creature is necessarily (7. e. 
by the exigency of his own identity) antagonis- 
tic to the creator; and it is absurd to suppose 
self-love capable of originating things contrary 
to itself. It is in fact the exact -distinction be- 
tween God's love and ours, that the former Is 
essentially creative, the latter destructive. 

There is no way of denying the creative in- 
finitude but by denying the creative holiness. 
If you choose to say that lying, adultery and 
murder are akin to the heart of God, then of 
course you may argue that creation costs Him 
nothing; is in fact a mere flurry of His pent-up 
idle force liable to be as capriciously undone as 
it was capriciously begun : but not otherwise. 
If you believe that these things are infinitely 
contrary to the heart of God : if you believe 
that God has never been soothed but always 



82 Personality the true 

outraged by the envy and the malice, by the 
subtle perfidy and the open rancor, which have 
envenomed human intercourse in all the past; 
then you must admit that the love which goes 
to the creation of man, in whom all these odi- 
ous things naturally inhere, and to the endowing 
him with the sceptre of universal dominion, is 
really infinite ; since it cannot go forth save in 
the way of its own eternal humiliation. 

In very truth this altogether unobtrusive fact 
of selfhood or natural life which we are all born 
to, and which we therefore think nothing of 
but accept as a mere matter of course, is itself 
the eternal marvel of creation. We ourselves 
can modify existence almost at pleasure; we can 
change the form of existing things; /. e. can con- 
vert natural forms into artificial ones. But we 
cannot confer life ; cannot make these artifi- 
cial forms self-conscious or living. We can 
turn a block of wood into a table, a block of 
stone into a statue ; but our work in no wise 
reflects the vivacity of Nature, because we not 
being life in ourselves, cannot possibly commu- 
nicate life to the work of our hands. We frame 
a beautiful effigy of life ; but the effigy remains 
forever uninhabited, forever irresponsive to the 
love which fashions it; in short forever uncon- 
scious or dead. 

Now the splendor of the creative activity is, 
that it makes even this effigy of itself alive with 
the amplest life ; its product being no cold in- 
animate statue, but a living breathing exulting 
person. In short the everlasting miracle is that 



Marvel of Creation. 83 

God is able, in giving us Himself, to endow us 
with our own finite selfhood as well; leaving 
us thereby so unidentified with Himself, so ut- 
terly free and untrammelled to our own con- 
sciousness as to be able very often seriously to 
doubt, and not seldom permanently to deny 
His own existence. And this miracle I say is 
utterly inexplicable upon any datum but that I 
have alleged, namely : that God is so truly infi- 
nite in love as not to shrink from shrouding 
His uncreated splendor in His creature's linea- 
ments, from eternally humiliating Himself to 
the lowest possibilities of creaturely imbecility 
and iniquity, in order that the creature may 
thus become freely or spiritually elevated to 
the otherwise impracticable heights of His ma- 
jestic wisdom and goodness. 

I ask no indulgence of my reader for this 
language. I literally mean what I say, that 
creation is absolutely contingent upon the Divine 
ability to humble Himself to the creature's level, 
to diminish Himself to the creature's natural 
dimensions. Language is incapable of paint- 
ing too vividly the strength of my convictions 
on this subject. If the creature by the bare 
fact of his creatureship be demonstrably void 
of life in himself, then the creator can only 
succeed in rescuing him from' this intrinsic 
death, and elevating him to Himself, by first 
abasing Himself to the creature; /. e. allowing 
His proper infinitude or perfection to be so 
swallowed up in the other's proper finiteness 
or imperfection, as never by any possibility to 



84 "The Creature's Identity 

come into the least overt collision with it. Thus 
whenever I draw a breath or perform any auto- 
matic function; when I see or hear or smell or 
taste or touch ; when I hunger or thirst ; when 
I think or take cognizance of any truth; when 
I glow with passion; when I do good or evil 
to my fellow-man ; my ability in all these cases 
is due exclusively to that great truth clearly re- 
vealed in Christianity, and revealed nowhere 
else, in fact utterly denied everywhere else, 
namely: that God's love to me is so truly infi- 
nite ^ i. e. untainted by the least admixture of 
love to Himself, as to permit Him within the 
entire periphery of my consciousness physical 
intellectual and moral, to veil Himself so effec- 
tually from sight, to obscure and as it were an- 
nihilate Himself so completely on my behalf, 
that I cannot help feeling myself to exist abso- 
lutely or irrespectively of Him, and enjoy a 
conscious ability not only to do what is congru- 
ous with His ultimate good pleasure in me, but 
to abound if I please at any moment in all man- 
ner of profane injurious and filthy behavior. 

In short and to sum up all I have said in 
one word: the interests of the creature's natural 
identity are the paramount concern of the crea- 
tive Love. To establish these interests on an 
impregnable basis, and so make them eternally 
tributary to the creature's spiritual individuality, 
constitute it may be said the sole burden of the 
creative Wisdom. It is manifestly impossible 
that the creature should ever realize that spirit- 
ual conjunction with the creator which is life, 






the Prime Interest of Creation, 85 

unless he first exist in some form of his own ; 
unless he get at all events a quasi projection 
from, or disjunction with, the creator by coming 
to a veracious consciousness. And existence or 
consciousness is impossible of course, unless 
natural selfhood be allowed him, unless, in 
other words, that common principle of destitution 
which characterizes all creatures, regarded in 
themselves or intrinsically and apart from the 
Divine conjunction, become vivified by the ere* 
ative bounty, and so furnish a valid ground of 
consciousness to him, on which any amount of 
spiritual intercourse between him and his creator 
may subsequently be transacted. My nature ex- 
presses what I have in common with all other 
existence, thus what gives me identity: L e. 
what forever fixes or finites me to my own 
consciousness, and to others' regard; and with- 
out this natural root I should be utterly incapa- 
ble of that rational growth and spiritual flower- 
ing or fructification which we call individuality 
or character. All true character in me, all my 
distinctive individuality, is what the heat of 
God's goodness and the light of His truth alone 
bring forth out of that subterranean root: so 
that without His tender and solicitous nourish- 
ment arresting its downward growth and giving 
it a contrary direction, the root would stretch 
evermore and irresistibly downward to the low- 
est hell. 

But here lies the practical difficulty to which 
I have already adverted, as calling for all the 
resources of the Divine infinitude to overcome 



86 The Practical Obstacle to it 

it. The very nature of the creature puts such 
an obstacle in the way of creation, that unless 
the creative Love were really infinite, that is, 
wholly unlimited by self-love, it would be im- 
possible to vanquish it. For manifestly the es- 
sential nature or the creature as a creature : 
as a being wholly dependent upon another than 
himself, is what alone gives him identity, by 
stamping him at once as the total opposite of 
God, or declaring him to be absolutely non- 
existent, intrinsically full of death, incapable of 
being. His nature is not-to-hz* just as God's 
is to-be : so that he cannot possibly begin to be, 
until this very nature of his has been Divinely 
quickened, or raised from death to life. The 
first care of the creator is to give the creature 
identity, or eternal projection from Himself; and 
what we call his nature, i. e. what he possesses 
in common with all existence, is the only possi- 
ble or veracious ground of this identity. But 
the nature of the creature, what he has in com- 
mon with all existence, is an utter intrinsic des- 
titution of life, is an intrinsic plenitude of death 
so to speak. It is therefore manifestly impossi- 
ble for the Divine Love to give actual being to 
the creature, with any regard to the latter's con- 
scious permanence or identity, unless this very 
death which is the substance of the created na- 
ture become taken up into some superior form 
of life ; unless this very destitution which is the 
sole badge of the creature's identity, and the 
sole guarantee of the veracity of his conscious- 
ness, be Divinely glorified into some form of 



in the Nature of the Creature. 87 

spiritual abundance. The creative power of 
course encounters no spiritual obstacle, because 
manifestly the creature is spiritually null or non- 
existent and unconscious, until he has been first 
of all naturally vivified : L e. until that invinci- 
ion to death which his very nature 
; him u n< as been previously vanquished 

e power, and corruption given place 
to incoii^ r ; 

Natural religion is 01 course indifferent to all 
these considerations of method or order in the 
Divine creation. It regards creation not as a 
rational or orderly procession of the Divine 
spirit into every appropriate form of manifesta- 
tion; but as a mere brute display of physical 
power on God's part, the same in kind but dif- 
ferent in degree from that we attribute to the 
conjuror or magician. Magical power, the 
power of bringing something out of nothing, 
is the sole conception the natural religionist en- 
tertains of the Divine activity; he regards the 
physical constitution of things as a wholly arbi- 
trary or unconditioned product of the Divine 
will, and supposes it undesigned to minister to 
any deeper consciousness in us than that of sense. 

It is in fact the prerogative of Revelation to 
assert this great redemption of human nature, as 
the inmost scope and substance of God's crea- 
tive energy. Revelation alone shows us how 
God is able to invest His creature with a selfhood 
which shall be indisputably his own, and so in- 
exorably separate him to all eternity from his 
creator, even while inviting and engaging the 



88 Revelation alone competent to the Question. 

most intimate spiritual conjunction with Him. 
It does this by sharply separating between the 
conscious and the unconscious realm of life in 
man, or proving that our moral righteousness is 
in every case an inverse, and not a direct, i 
ure of our spiritual relation to God. 
great commanding light which Revelation be- 
stows upon the intellect ; and unless J?K' ,aphy 
therefore consent to accept its g>< cUiice, she will 
remain hereafter as thoroughly incompetent to 
the conduct of the mind as she has always proved 
herself hitherto ; and must erelong definitively 
avow herself, what all her recent aspirations bind 
her to become, the humble, besotted, and yet 
most superfluous waiting-maid of Science. 

Let us examine however with some attention 
the existing attitude of Philosophy with respect 
to the fundamental verity of an actual creation. 



CHAPTER V. 

To create a thing means obviously to give it 
inward substance or being; but as nothing can 
inwardly be unless it also outwardly exist, or go 
forth in its proper form, so consequently when 
God is said to create or give being to things, it 
is manifestly implied that He gives them their 
own distinctive form or selfhood as well. In a 
word the idea of objective creation philosophi- 
cally involves or presupposes a subordinate pro- 
cess of subjective formation or redemption; be- 
cause otherwise the creature must fail to attain to 
that conscious identity, or projection from his 
creative source, which is essential to the integrity 
and actuality of the creative work. 

It is the business of Philosophy to vindicate 
this invariable implication of form in substance 
to popular regard. For everywhere the unin- 
structed mind demands how any such experience 
as this I have just painted, should ever actually 
arise % This consciousness of selfhood in the 
creature, how shall it ever be able to attain to 
veracity ? How shall it ever be able practically 
to come about? If the creature be the abject 
and utterly dependent offspring of the Divine 
power, how is it possible that He should ever 
feel in the slightest measure that sentiment of 



90 Philosophy's true Fun Ef ion. 

purely personal force and dignity, which throbs 
in every pulse of morality? If my being lie 
most distinctly in another than myself how shall 
I ever have the power to say, or even to think, 
me mine, thee thine, him his, i. e. to project myself 
to such a distance both from my creative source 
and my fellow-creature, as to feel my own inex- 
tinguishable property in myself, and inevitably 
to claim the responsibility of my own actions ? 
In short how shall creation ever become actual, 
ever prove anything more than a form of imper- 
fect human thought, than a figure of delusive 
human speech? 

All these questions, I say, which are the bane 
of the popular understanding, it is the business 
of Philosophy alone to elucidate; for Philoso- 
phy assumes to be the exponent intellectually 
of creation, or to reconcile God and man. From 
the beginning of history the aim of Philosophy 
has been to avouch the purely spiritual origin 
and quality of life; to assert the underlying infin- 
itude which embeds all finite existence, and lifts 
it eventually out of the chaos it is in itself, into 
the foundations of a lustrous city worthy the 
eternal King to inhabit. . Philosophy is thus a 
most strict demonstration of the Infinite within 
the finite, of the Absolute within the relative ; 
and her very existence accordingly should bind 
her to permit, much more to offer, no damage 
to the minor interest. If the Infinite and Ab- 
solute dwell within the finite and relative as the 
soul dwells within the body, that is to say, not 
spatially indeed or mechanically as a tenant 



Treachery of Philosophers to it. 91 

dwells within a house, or a sword in its scabbard, 
but spiritually or dynamically as the cause dwells 
within the effect, or life within the subject of 
life, or thought within speech : then of course 
Philosophy is bound to cherish the finite and 
relative with peculiar tenderness, not on their 
own account primarily of course, but because 
they alone house and they alone reveal that 
transcendent substance whereby she lives. 

But now how actually stands the case with 
Philosophy? Does Philosophy as at present 
constituted appear to feel any longer the force 
of these ancient obligations ? Not a whit. She 
is on the contrary utterly faithless to them. Either 
with Kant and Sir William Hamilton she pu- 
sillanimously evades them, by denying the vera- 
city of our knowledge of the finite, and hence 
putting our belief of the Infinite upon a mere 
arbitrary basis, authority ; or else with Hegel 
she audaciously vacates them, by denying the 
duality of infinite and finite, of God and man ; 
so converting what we have been wont to deem 
a sincere work of creation into a frivolous game 
of bo-peep on God's part, seeking to come to 
the consciousness of His proper infinitude by 
undergoing the temporary imprisonment and 
obscuration of the finite. Creation thus carica- 
tured claims of course no more essential dignity 
than the chase of the kitten after its own tail. 
Sir William Hamilton justly enough regards 
" the science of the absolute " in Hegel's hands 
as a mere dodge of the difficulties accruing to 
Philosophy from the Kantian metaphysics. Yet 



Q2 Sir William Hamilton makes 

even that dodge is in my opinion greatly less 
discreditable to its authors, and evinces a far 
more sagacious feeling of the needs of Philos- 
ophy, than Sir William's own shallow and bois- 
terous effort to push these metaphysics to their 
last gasp of absurdity. 

The way Sir William Hamilton, following 
Kant, takes to demonstrate the incompetency 
of Philosophy to justify our religious instincts, 
or formulate a doctrine of creation which shall 
be adequate to satisfy the demands of the intel- 
lect, is by showing that we are incapable of ar- 
riving at the infinite in knowledge, save by the 
utter degradation and demolition of the finite. 
He insists upon the internecine hostility of In- 
finite and finite, of God and nature, with such 
heartiness of good will, as to make out that the 
reality of the one in knowledge is inevitably 
fatal to that of the other; the relation between 
them being not reciprocally affirmative but sim- 
ply contradictory. He takes the greatest pains 
to show that we must necessarily ignore the 
infinite and absolute merely because we know 
the finite and relative : since the latter exclude 
the former instead of revealing them. In fact 
he devoted his lively powers to such a thorough 
degradation of our knowledge, as makes it no 
longer a trust-worthy instrument and vehicle — 
I will not say of revealed or spiritual truth alone, 
but — even of the lowest sensual information: 
and then called the ghastly residuum Philos- 
ophy. Thus according to Sir William's show- 
ing Philosophy excludes us not only from the 



Scepticism the true basis of Faith. 93 

heavenly bread which has hitherto been our 
nutriment, not only from the fatted calf of the 
paternal mansion, but also from the very husks 
which the swine themselves eat, under the plea 
that the whole thing is a delusion and mockery 
of true nourishment. 

The fundamental axiom of the Kantian meta- 
physics, which is the spring-board of all Sir 
William Hamilton's speculative agility, is that 
the forms of our sensibility and intelligence so 
dominate the data of our knowledge as to leave 
us utterly ignorant of " real " existence, thus 
forcing us upon scepticism as the highest cul- 
ture. The forms of our intelligence so modify 
the contents of sense and reason, that we know 
nothing truly, L e. as it is in itself but only phe- 
nomenally or as it appears under the shaping and 
depraving influence of our own faculties. Sir 
William Hamilton not only accepted this dap- 
per little pedantry as the consummate deliver- 
ance of Philosophy, as the true measure of our 
intelligence, but he disgorged all the accumu- 
lations of his plethoric memory, and lavished 
every secretion of his frenzied faculty of no- 
menclature, to illustrate and universalize it. 
The intellectual heart of the philosopher grew 
so superfluous upon this delirious diet, that he 
at last fancied himself doing his fellow-men a 
service rather than an injury, in persuading them 
that they could have no true knowledge of God 
even by means of a dire El revelation from Himself 
A God, he says, who is capable of being intel- 
ligently recognized, is no God at all. Even 



94 Kant makes Real Things Unintelligible 

God's own good-will is shown to be powerless 
in the premises: i. e. will avail to make us know 
Him, not as He is in truth, but only as He con- 
trives to appear in some fallacious effigy ap- 
proximate to our intelligence. It of course 
results that any absolutely trustworthy knowl- 
edge of God either as creator, redeemer or ad- 
ministrator of the world, is intellectually vision- 
ary and presumptuous, and each of us is left 
accordingly to such conceptions of the Divine 
Name as ignorance and superstition, which alone 
rule in the absence of knowledge and true phi- 
losophy, suggest. 

But let us look a little more closely at our 
subject. The soul of Kant's egregious discrimi- 
nation of noumena from phenomena, is that things 
are their own (unintelligible) substance as well 
as their own (intelligible) form. Both Kant 
and Sir William Hamilton conceive every thing 
under two modes : one substantial, which is the 
thing-in~itself; the other formal, which is not the 
thing as it is in itself, but only as it appears 
under the modifying and misleading lights of 
our intelligence. Thus the horse passing my 
window at this moment is in-himself or really, 
his own unintelligible substance; but in us, that 
is, through the modifying and indeed most mag- 
ical forms of our understanding, he becomes 
converted from reality into phenomenality : in 
other words, from unintelligible becomes intelli- 
gible. And they both maintain that do what 
we will, even with God helping us, we can 
never know the " real " animal, but only this 



and Intelligible things Unreal 95 

base sophisticated one. Indeed they will not 
even permit themselves to postulate so much as 
existence for these quizzical noumena; author- 
izing only the most rapid mental glimpse of 
them in the interest of that overpowering scep- 
ticism which they conceive to be due to phenom- 
ena. Hence these jolly philosophers conclude, 
that our knowledge being so uncertain, nay, so 
directly misleading in respect to the truth of 
things, as to be far less honorable to us than our 
ignorance, is unworthy to base any assured system 
of beliefs: so that Philosophy, which is the 
science of belief, incontinently confesses herself 
under this compulsion exanimate or empty for 
want of subject matter to fill her out. In plain 
English, the decrepit old dame tumbles into such 
ecstasies of alarm at the voice of the stout un- 
filial footpads, whom her own penurious paps 
have starved into matricide, as instantly to sur- 
render all she is traditionally worth, in order to 
save her henceforth worthless life. 

What is the intellectual motive of all this 
talk on the part of Kant and his follower Sir 
William Hamilton, about "things-in-themselves" 
or noumena as constituting the only realities, 
while their phenomenal apparitions in sense 
and reason are respectively unreal? Their mo- 
tive is honorable. It is to get rid thereby of 
the traditional conception of creation, and so 
discharge Philosophy of a burden to which in 
their estimation she is incompetent, that namely 
of avouching the Infinite and Absolute in knowl- 
edge. Both Kant and Sir William Hamilton 



96 Sir William Hamilton runs 

entertained a purely scientific conception of cre- 
ation, never for an instant a philosophic one, the 
conception which science inherits from Natural 
Religion, and which makes creation a work of 
God in space and time ; /. e. to consist in endow- 
ing things with finite or at most relative exist- 
ence; so sundering them forever from the im- 
mortal being they have in God. Of course any 
such beggarly style of existence as this must 
confess itself unvivified by the Highest ; and 
Philosophy therefore as the science of being 
must confess herself nonplussed. By the show- 
ing of these bastard disciples accordingly Philos- 
ophy is not, what all her legitimate children have 
hitherto deemed her, namely: a perfect intellect- 
ual justification of the religious instinct, the 
instinct which prompts mankind to aspire after 
an intimate and exact knowledge of God. On 
the contrary, she declares herself in their hands 
a remorseless traitor both to religion and to 
science, in avouching the utter fatuity of our 
knowledge. Our knowledge — if we believe 
these exquisitely fuddled adepts — exercises such 
a witchery over its own contents, that it is im- 
prudent to confide in it except when it is inert. 
For the moment it is exerted it imposes such 
a change upon the thing known, that the thing 
becomes at once and adroitly converted from 
the " real " thing, or thing-in-itself, into a mere 
changeling substituted by the fairy forms of our 
sensibility and intelligence. Thus our knowl- 
edge is no longer a figurative confession of our 
ignorance, but, according to Sir William Ham- 



Kanfs Doftrine into the Ground. 97 

ilton especially, who is merely Kant gone to 
seed, a literal demonstration of it. It fell to Sir 
William's lot to utter a vast deal of error upon 
every metaphysic topic he broached ; but it 
all aspired to this triumphantly paralytic re- 
sult, namely : — not that our actual knowledge 
quantitatively viewed, or as measured against 
the still remaining depths of our ignorance, 
sinks into vanity : this is an obvious dictate of 
common sense : but — that knowledge itself 
qualitatively viewed, or regarded as knowledge, 
is ignorance : since whatsoever is known be- 
comes by that fact unreal, and whatsoever is 
real becomes by that fact unknown and un- 
knowable. For example : there may be such a 
being as God ; there may be such an existence 
as a horse: but Philosophy does not and cannot 
say whether there is or is not. All that she is 
able to say intelligently is, that if either the one 
or the other object does really exist, it will be 
forever prevented by that fact from becoming 
known : because knowledge has no relation to 
real things, but only to the ghosts or apparitions 
of real things. 

Into such bewildered gabble as this have "the 
lispings of divine Philosophy " become trans- 
muted at last ! Would you not infer that Kant 
and Sir William Hamilton, but especially Sir 
William, who is as vivacious in absurdity as 
Kant is dull and operose, propose no other des- 
tiny for Philosophy than to reduce her to the 
dimensions of an intricate " Irish bull " *? 

However this may be, Philosophy by the 



98 Between the two Philosophy 

showing of her most approved disciples has 
plainly reached a crisis in her history, such a 
crisis as augurs either an everlasting and most 
righteous entombment for her, or else a speedy 
resurrection. In place of giving us as she once 
aspired to do, improved conceptions of the high- 
est themes, she sets herself to deny us the power 
of conceiving of any theme save in a puerile 
misleading way. She not only extrudes us in- 
tellectually from the actual though rude home 
which has hitherto sheltered us from the weather, 
but she turns us into a set of disreputable de- 
spairing tramps eternally incapable of any home : 
starving with a most vital cold and hunger, and 
yet knocking at the doors of our intellectual 
grandees only to get informed by some authen- 
tic supercilious Yellowplush, that bed and board 
are in the very nature of things illusory goods, 
which every philosophic outcast and vagabond 
ought to be above seriously coveting. In short 
in thus unsettling the principles of our knowl- 
edge Philosophy d fortiori exposes our most 
assured beliefs to an utter downfall; for belief 
rests upon knowledge as a house rests upon its 
foundation. 

Decidedly then one owes no apology to Phi- 
losophy for saying that she is at the turning- 
point of her destiny, and that unless she gather 
herself up out of the mire in which she is wal- 
lowing, it will soon be all over with her. It is 
true that Kant devolves upon the moral instinct, 
as Sir William Hamilton devolves upon a blind 
faith, the duty from which they severally absolve 



is Reduced to a Pious Hiccup. 99 

Philosophy, that of conducting men to the In- 
finite in knowledge. But what is this but to 
exhibit Philosophy transferring to other hands 
her own appropriate office of mediating between 
heaven and earth, between religion and science, 
between truth and fact, between life and exist- 
ence, while she herself urges upon us instead a 
lesson of abject helpless scepticism with refer- 
ence to both interests? Philosophy proper ac- 
cording to both of these authorities utterly re- 
fuses any longer to function, being incapable 
even of recognizing any infinite or any finite, 
any absolute or any relative, much more of rec- 
onciling them in eternal amity. Suppose you 
should instruct your attorney to sue a certain 
person for the recovery of moneys due, and the 
attorney should reply that there was such a hope- 
less dislocation to his mind between you and 
your debtor, such an ever growing indistinctness 
of boundary between the parties, as to make it 
impossible for him to conceive where creditor 
ended and debtor began: would you not say, 
my friend, you are manifestly drunk and unfit 
for business ? When Philosophy then presents 
herself in precisely similar plight, so drunken 
with the new wine of science as to renounce 
her own sober heavenly speech, and attempt 
putting off upon us this desperate and maudlin 
cant of the highest reason being ever the highest 
uncertainty, and the truest knowledge the truest 
ignorance, let us scourge the brazen trollop from 
our doors, and give her prison fare till she mends 
her manners. 



loo Philosophy wholly unharmed 

I know that a fashionable scepticism prevails 
just now among learned doctors, as to the abil- 
ity of Philosophy to recover from her long de- 
bauch, and vindicate by future services the essen- 
tial divinity of her origin. M. duguste Comte for 
example who styled himself, and what is even 
more extraordinary believed himself, fondateur 
de la religion de Vhumanite, and his greatly more 
sprightly disciple Mr. G. H. Lewes, author of 
The Biographical History of Philosophy, do not 
hesitate to deride any such possibility, and pro- 
nounce the illustrious sufferer already dead. But 
both of these gentlemen exhibit so very jolly a 
demeanor upon the occasion, leering at such a 
rate, as Dr. Wilkinson has observed, 1 upon the 
chambermaids, and thrusting their tongues so 
significantly into their cheeks at the bystanders, 
that you at once detect the evidence of some 
foregone conclusion, or at all events distrust the 
judgment of an intelligence which begins in so 
little sympathy. M. Comte especially whatever 
may have been his merits as a scientific observer, 
upon which I am utterly unskilled to pronounce, 
was ludicrously devoid of philosophic insight. 
He so persistently rubbed the nose of his intelli- 
gence in the mud of mere Existence, so wilfully 
restricted its complacent feet to paddling in the 
shallowest waters of Fact, that he became obdu- 
rately blind to all the higher problems of Life 
and Truth, and ended by running the stupendous 
edifice of human destiny into a thing of such 

1 See his striking Review of llje Democratic Review of some 
Lewes' History of Philosophy, in ten years since. 



by the Positivists. 10 1 

abjectly culinary dimensions as would revolt 
even the imagination of a cook. It was the 
case of a serious-minded conceited hodman fan- 
cying himself an architect, and aspiring to con- 
struct a new Alhambra or St. Peter's. 

No man of Comte's intellectual make has the 
slightest title to prejudice the question in hand, 
because he has no apprehension of the spiritual 
uses of Philosophy, which alone supply the clew 
to its solution. The grand use of Philosophy 
is to promote the spiritual understanding in man, 
by disengaging the infinite in human conception 
from the grasp of the finite, or what is the same 
thing, revealing the latent harmony which pre- 
vails between being and seeming, between sub- 
stance and form, between spirit and flesh. Evi- 
dently then the very first requisite to a competent 
judgment of Philosophy is, that one believe in 
the Infinite at least as much as he believes in the 
finite, or be quite as unwilling to see religion 
merge in science as to see science absorbed by 
religion. None of these men fulfil this condi- 
tion. They all admit the Finite, but they scout 
the Infinite out of sight as a rational cognition. 
They perfectly believe in science, but they have 
a total disbelief in religion save as an early ne- 
cessity of the scientific intellect, or at best a 
courteous doffing of the hat ~ to Deity. They 
are consequently all alike incompetent to esti- 
mate the grandly reconciling genius and func- 
tion of Philosophy, just as incompetent as a one- 
legged man would be to run a race, or a one- 
eyed man to appreciate the stereoscope. It is 



102 The total Problem of Philosophy 

ludicrous to suppose Philosophy endangered by 
any amount of such lap-sided hostility : you 
might as well fancy a clear-shining candle in 
danger of extinction from the widowed moiety 
of an original pair of snuffers. 

As I have already intimated a much less famous 
but in my opinion very superior man to either 
of these great men or indeed to all of them put 
together, has already fulfilled every demand of 
Philosophy, in strict accordance too with a phil- 
osophic temper; that is, without either coward- 
ice or bravado. Swedenborg disperses all the 
shallow sciolism we have been discussing, by sol- 
idly vindicating the philosophic basis of creation. 
He demonstrates that the sole real existence, the 
only possible ground of consciousness, for the 
creature in so far as he is a creature, is phenome- 
nal ; thus virtually scourging the conception of 
noumenal existence as distinguished from phe- 
nomenal forever out of sight. He demonstrates 
beyond the possibility of a rational cavil that 
the pretension of noumenal existence on the part 
of a creature, the pretension to possess existence- 
in-himself, is absurd or contradictory; and so 
turns Philosophy from a suicidal chase of phan- 
toms into a living and loving recognition of the 
Infinite within the very bosom of the finite, of 
the Absolute within the very bosom of the rela- 
tive. 

The total problem of Philosophy is, to recon- 
cile freedom with dependence; or to show how 
finite may be incessantly vivified by infinite, 
without necessary inflation to the lower interest 



is to reconcile Freedom with Dependence. 103 

or necessary collapse to the higher : in short 
with reciprocal advantage to both interests. 
This problem I delight to repeat has been for 
the first time in the intellectual history of the 
race, virtually solved by Emanuel Swedenborg. 
This great man perfectly vindicates what is at 
once the eternal truth and the eternal marvel of 
creation, by proving to us that God is able to 
endow his creature with selfhood, or make him 
the unquestionable source of his own actions, 
not only without in the least degree vitiating, 
but while actually intensifying the creature's de- 
pendence upon Himself. And he does this with 
no metaphysical straining or scholastic posturing, 
such as fatigue you to death in the pages of the 
philosophic eunuchs whose shrill discordant 
voices alone possess the public ear : but simply 
by alleging the Divine infinitude not indeed as 
an irrational quantity or faculty of endless hocus- 
pocus, but as the most actual and intelligible 
working-power of the universe ; and by deduc- 
ing therefrom those spiritual laws, the conditions 
of man's true being as natural laws are those of 
his phenomenal being, to which alone we must 
look henceforward for an answer to every ques- 
tion touching human freedom or human des- 
tiny. 

In thus avowing my intellectual obligations 
to Swedenborg's writings, I have no wish to 
conceal my honest sense of their conventional 
literary limitations. I fully concede indeed to 
Swedenborg what is usually denied him, name- 
ly, an extreme sobriety of mind displayed under 



104 Swedenborg solves it honestly 

all the exceptional circumstances of his career, 
and which ends by making us feel at last his 
every word to be almost insipid with veracity. 
I cordially appreciate moreover the rare destitu- 
tion of wilfulness which characterizes all his 
researches; or rather the childlike docility of 
spirit which leads him to seek and to recognize 
under all the most contradictory aspects of na- 
ture, the footsteps of the Highest. But I should 
be sorry to commend him to the attention of 
our mere men-of-letters. There seems a ludi- 
crous incongruity for example between his grim 
sincere performances and the enamelled offspring 
of Mr. Tennyson's muse, or the ground-and- 
lofty- tumbling of an accomplished literary acro- 
bat like Macaulay. It is evident that he himself 
never once dreamed of conciliating so dainty a 
judgment. It would be like trying the main- 
sail of a man-of-war by a cambric handkerchief. 
His books are a dry unimpassioned unexagger- 
ated exposition of the things he daily saw and 
heard in the world of spirits, and of the spirit- 
ual laws which these things illustrate; with 
scarcely any effort whatever to blink the ob- 
vious outrage his experiences offer to sensuous 
prejudice, or to conciliate any interest in his 
reader which is not prompted by the latter's 
own original and unaffected relish of the truth. 
Such sincere books it seems to me were never 
before written. He grasped with clear intel- 
lectual vision the seminal principles of things, 
and hence is never tempted to that dreary So- 
cratic ratiocination about their shifting super- 



and without Ostentation. 105 

ficial appearances, which give great talkers a re- 
pute for knowledge. Full however as his books 
are on this account of the profoundest philo- 
sophic interest, they naturally contribute almost 
nothing to one's scientific advantage. You need 
never go to them for any dire El help upon exist- 
ing social or scientific problems. You might as 
well go to a waving wheat-field to demand a loaf 
of bread. Just as in the latter case before get- 
ting one's loaf, one would be obliged to harvest 
his wheat and convert it into flour, and then con- 
vert the flour itself into dough, and afterwards 
allow the dough to ferment before putting it in 
the oven and baking his bread: so in the former 
case before getting the slightest scientific aid 
from Swedenborg, he will be obliged first of all 
intellectually to harvest his spiritual principles, 
and then gradually bring them down through 
the hopper of his imperious daily needs, and 
under the guidance of the great truth of human 
equality or fellowship, into social and personal 
applications wholly unforeseen I doubt not and 
perhaps undreamt of by the author himself. 



CHAPTER VI. 

Our business however does not lie with Swe- 
denborg himself in any degree, but with his 
doctrine of Nature, or the very direct and enor- 
mous bearing which his disclosures of spiritual 
laws exert upon Philosophy. I say emphati- 
cally his doctrine of Nature : for although it 
is true that Nature in Swedenborg's view occu- 
pies a strictly subordinate position with respect 
to Spirit, the position indeed of a foundation 
with respect to its superstructure, it is none the 
less, therefore, but only all the more true, that 
upon the infinitude of the Divine power as ex- 
hibited primarily in the natural sphere of crea- 
tion, will depend the infinitude of His love and 
wisdom as they are subsequently to be disen- 
gaged in the spiritual sphere. 

The most fundamental of all the laws of spir- 
itual existence upon which Swedenborg insists, 
is that of the strict involution of the natural world 
in the spiritual, so as that the former could no 
more exist without the latter, than an effect 
could exist without a cause, a glove without a 
hand, a mould without a substance to be mould- 
ed, a skin without a something to be covered ; 
nor the latter subsist without the former any 



Swedenborg's Doclrine of Nature. 107 

more than a cause could subsist without an 
effect, a soul without a body, affection without 
thought, thought without speech, speech with- 
out organs. " All natural goods and truths," he 
says, " exist and descend from celestial and spir- 
itual goods and truths ; for there is not a single 
natural good and truth which does not exist 
from a spiritual good, which itself exists from 
a celestial good; and by these also it subsists. 
Were the spiritual world to recede from the 
natural, the natural world would cease to be. 
The origin of the universe is in this wise : All 
things in general and particular, are from the 
Lord : from Him is the celestial man ; through 
the celestial again the spiritual ; through the 
spiritual in its turn, the natural; and through 
the natural the corporeal and sensual man. And 
as each thus exists or goes forth from the Lord, 
so also each subsists or endures by Him : for 
subsistence, as is known, is perpetual exist- 
ence." 1 

" The sensual life is the lowest or ultimate 
form of human life : and what is the lowest or 
ultimate contains all higher or interior things, 
and is their common ground or covering, for they 
terminate in it and so rest upon it. The case is 
similar with the skin, which being the outmost 
integument of the body, and therefore the conti- 
nent of all its interior things, these latter termi- 
nate in it and thus rest upon it. Similar also is 
the case with the peritoneum in the body, in 
which the abdominal viscera are enveloped : 

l Arc. Cel., 775. 



108 Swedenborg's Doflrine of Nature. 

these also rest upon it, and have a common tie 
with it; as the thoracic viscera have also with 
the pleura. The case is similar also with respect 
to the things of the intellect and will in man. 
There is in these things an orderly succession 
from interior to exterior; exterior things being 
the pursuits and pleasures of science, while ex- 
treme things are the sensual delights which com- 
municate with the world, by the organs of sight 
hearing taste smell and touch : upon these, inte- 
rior things rest, because in these they terminate. 
It is to be observed moreover that all things in 
whole and in part from the First or Inmost pro- 
ceed successively to their ultimates, and there 
rest. Prior or interior things also in successive 
order are linked with ultimate things, so that if 
the ultimate things were taken away, the higher 
or interior would also disappear. Hence also 
there are three heavens, the inmost or third 
heaven influencing the middle or second one, 
and this again influencing the lowest or first 
heaven, while this last in its turn influences man 
(on earth) : which makes the human race the 
orderly ultimate in which heaven ends and in 
which it reposes. It is on this account that the 
Lord of his Divine mercy always provides that 
a church may exist with the human race, in 
which the Divine Truth may be revealed which 
in our earth is the Word. This revelation af- 
fords an enveloping link (continens nexus) be- 
tween the human race and the heavens. Hence 
it is that throughout the Word an internal sense 
lies hidden, which the angels perceive and which 



Swedenb org's Doclrine of Nature. 109 

binds their minds so closely to ours, that both 
act as one." 1 

If you demand the philosophy of this arrange- 
ment, or ask why it is on the one hand that 
spirit thus involves nature as a cause involves its 
effect, or as soul involves body; and why it is 
on the other hand that nature evolves spirit, as 
an effect evolves its cause, or as body evolves 
soul ; he will reply by telling you with the ut- 
most profuseness of detail and explanation, that 
life being spiritual cannot be created but only 
communicated ; and in order to such communi- 
cation some basis must exist adequate to insure 
it. This is his complete reply to your question, 
confirmed and illustrated by any amount of learn- 
ing. God Himself is life : so that to create life 
would be to create Himself, which is absurd. 
He cannot possibly create life consequently, but 
only communicate it; and in order to His doing 
so forms must exist adequate to receive the com- 
munication, and house it to eternity. Read for 
example the following passages, which might be 
indefinitely multiplied. 

" Life viewed in itself which is God, cannot 
create another which shall be life itself, for the 
life which is God is uncreated continuous and 
indivisible ; whence it is that God is one. But 
the life which is God can create forms out of sub- 
stances that are not life, in which it may indwell, 
making them to seem as if they lived (of them- 
selves). Men are such forms, which, since they 
are receptacles of life, could not in the first crea- 

1 Arc. Cel., 9216. 



110 Swede Jiborg's Doffrine of Nature. 

Hon be anything but images and likenesses of 
God, images from being receptacles of truth and 
likenesses from being receptacles of good. For 
life and its recipient subject adjust themselves to 
each other like active and passive, but do not 
commingle. Accordingly human forms which 
are recipients of life, do not live from themselves 
but from God, who alone is life, wherefore, as is 
known, all good in the heart and all truth in the 
intellect is from God. For if the slightest con- 
ceivable measure of life belonged to man, he 
might occupy a meritorious position towards 
God ; whereas if he believe this to be the case, 
the form recipient of life becomes closed from 
within, is perverted, and his understanding per- 
ishes. Good and the love of it, truth and the 
belief of it, are the life which is God : for God 
is good itself and truth itself, and therefore 
dwells in all good and truth with man. It fol- 
lows from these premises that man in himself is 
nothing, and that he is so much only as he re- 
ceives from the Lord, in the acknowledgment 
that it is not his own, but the Lord's. In this 
case the Lord makes him to be something, 
though not from himself but from the Lord. 

fct It appears to man as if he lived from himself; 
but this is a fallacy. If it were not so, he might 
have loved God from himself, and been wise 
from himself. The cause of this appearance 
with man is, that life inflows from God into his 
inmost parts, which are remote from the survey 
of his thought, and hence from perception. Be- 
sides, the principal cause which is Life, and the 



Swedenborg's Doftrine of Nature. m 

instrumental cause which is the form recipient 
of life, act together as one cause ; and this action 
is felt in the instrumental cause, thus in man, as 
if it were in himself. The fallacy is similar to 
that by which we feel that the light from which 
sight comes is in the eye, the sound from which 
hearing comes is in the ear, and so forth ; where- 
as in truth eyes, ears, and so forth, are organic 
recipient substances, thus instrumental or subor- 
dinate causes, while light, sound, and so forth, 
are principal causes : which two act together as 
one, or as active and passive. He who investi- 
gates things more profoundly may know that 
man as to all things in general and in particular, 
is an organ of life, and that what produces sense 
and perception flows in ab extra, and that it is 
Life itself (or God) which makes man thus feel 
and perceive as from himself, or by his own 
power. Another ground of the fallacious ap- 
pearance in question, is, that the Divine Love is 
of such a nature that it would willingly make 
over to man what is its own ; while still teach- 
ing him however that it is not from himself, 
since otherwise he could not be reformed." 1 

" The Divine Love and Wisdom can do no 
otherwise than be and exist in others cre- 
ATED from itself. The inmost life of love is, 
on the one hand, not to love itself but others, 
and to be conjoined with them in love; and on 
the other hand to be beloved by others, because 
conjunction demands reciprocity. The essence 
of all love, in fact its very life, its agreeableness, 

1 Essay upon the Athanasian Creed, 25, 26. 



112 Sweden!? org's Doflrine of Nature. 

its pleasantness, its deliciousness, its sweetness, its 
beatitude, its auspiciousness, its felicity, consists 
in conjunction. Love consists in this, that we 
would make over what is our own to another, and 
feel his pleasure as our own. Such is love. But 
to enjoy our own pleasure in another, and not his 
pleasure in ourselves, is not love ; for this is to 
love one's self, and not one's neighbor, which 
two loves are diametrically opposite. — Hence 
it is evident that the Divine Love can do no 
otherwise than be and exist in others whom it 
loves and by whom it is loved ; for if this is 
true of all finite love, it must be infinitely true 
of Love itself. With respect to God, it is im- 
possible that He should love, or be loved, by 
other beings in whom anything of infinite, or 
of the essence and life of Love-in-itself, that is, 
anything of Divine, exists; because in that case 
he would not be beloved by others, but by Him- 
self; for the infinite or Divine is one. If this 
existed in others than God, it would be God 
there ; and God consequently in place of being 
Love, would be self-love ; whereof not one 
aspiration is possible to Him, for it is totally 
opposed to the Divine essence. God's Love 
accordingly must be addressed to those in whom 
nothing of Divinity exists." l 

Now these forms are moulded exclusively by 
Nature. Nature is that preliminary realm of 
formation upon which the actuality of creation 
is suspended. It is the hand of God's power, 
by means of which His perfect Love and Wisdom 

1 Divine Love and Wisdom, 46-49. 



Swedenborg's Doclrine of Nature. 1 1 3 

become eternally communicable and communica- 
tive. The order of nature accordingly is only a 
visible picture of interior spiritual realities, or 
what is the same thing of the growth of the 
human mind, of its gradual formation out of its 
intrinsic ignorance and impotence into true 
knowledge and power, into such form in short 
as will permanently befit the Divine influx and 
indwelling. The life of Nature is a struggle 
upwards from the most wide-weltering commu- 
nity or chaos (exemplified in mineral existence) 
to the most pronounced and concentrated indi- 
viduality, (exemplified in moral existence). Na- 
ture thus culminates in man because the human 
form which is distinctively moral, alone suffices 
to afford that perfect natural mould or matrix by 
means of which the Divine Love evolves the 
spiritual creation. 

If hereupon the inquirer demand of Sweden- 
borg further, how it is that nature becomes sepa- 
rable in this state of things from spirit, or how 
the mould is kept from identifying itself with 
the thing moulded, his answer is prompt, name- 
ly : that the law of the mould obviously is, that 
it be no diretl but only an inverse measure of the 
thing moulded: in other words, that nature con- 
netls with sprit not by continuity but by correspon- 
dence. Thus the foundation of the house upon 
which its superstructure is moulded, stretches 
away downward to Hades, while the superstruc- 
ture itself mounts upward to heaven. Without 
this fundamental geometry of high and low, 
there would be no discrimination of base from 



1 14 Swedenborg's Dotlrine of Nature. 

building, consequently no architecture or order, 
but only a most odious chaos or confusion, leav- 
ing us finally to burrow holes in the ground for 
houses. Precisely so, if moral existence were 
not an inverted form of spiritual existence, 
rather than a direct or continuous one : that is 
to say, if it did not bring forth all the creature's 
native imbecility, and so characterize him to his 
own consciousness : it could afford no basis of 
identity between him and his fellow man, nor 
consequently any ground of discrimination be- 
tween man and God, between creature and cre- 
ator, but the two would run together in such 
inextricable confusion that creation would be 
impossible. Thus the destiny of all natural 
existence, and especially of the highest form of 
that existence which is the human or moral 
form, is to merge in spiritual; to serve merely 
as the mother earth of that translucent heaven : 
and we must not fail therefore to hold the two 
things as invariably inversely related, under pen- 
alty of forfeiting all understanding of God's 
order in creation. 

One word more. It is obvious that the per- 
fection of the thing moulded will depend upon 
the integrity of the mould : the stability of the 
house and its salubrity upon the strength and 
dryness of the foundation. Accordingly our 
spiritual life will be clear and lustrous, just in 
proportion as the natural experience upon which 
it proceeds is fully wrought out to its last gasp 
of possibility ; is left in short to itself, to its own 
legitimate issues. In other words, spiritual life 



Its total Subordination to Spirit. 115 

will become realized by us just in proportion to 
the intensity of our previous moral life : /'. e. to 
the degree in which its intrinsic lusts of pride 
and covetousness have become developed to our 
own consciousness, and we ourselves have been 
led by these discoveries to renounce all hope in 
ourselves, and confide for life wholly in God. 
In this case our native arrogance and contempt 
of others, our love of rule and overbearing man- 
ners generally, in short all our natural obduracy 
and unloveliness, become manifest to our own 
perception ; and while we seem to our own 
shallow judgment accordingly to be utterly God- 
forsaken, He is all the while inwardly shaping 
and building us up in the image of His immor- 
tal beauty. 

This in substance is Swedenborg's doctrine 
of Nature, or his view of the essential subordi- 
nation it bears to God's spiritual ends in crea- 
tion ; all its lower realms being involved in the 
constitution of man, or serving as the pedestal 
of moral existence, in order that that existence 
again may serve in its turn as a basis of spirit- 
ual life, life which, being Divine, cannot be cre- 
ated but only communicated. Natural existence 
is not spiritual existence, but only a basis of it ; 
just as the husk of grain or fruit is a basis for its 
own interior contents, protecting them while 
they grow and ripen. It is nothing else than a 
basis, because in proportion as a man's spiritual 
force augments, his natural force abates ; just as 
the shell of a nut decays as the kernel ripens. 
Moral existence is often thoughtlessly confound* 



1 1 6 Discrimination of Moral 

ed with spiritual, because it is so dominant a form 
of natural existence as to seem something apart 
from it. It is in fact only a natural form or ap- 
pearance of spiritual existence: such an appear- 
ance as spiritual existence puts on to the purely 
sensuous intelligence ; while in substance it is 
strictly natural, being nothing more nor less than 
the distinctive badge of human nature ; every 
man being constituted a man, that is, a partaker 
of his nature, exclusively by his morality. 

Perhaps the best definition we can make of 
the difference between spiritual and moral life, 
will be to say, that the former is spontaneous, or 
expresses itself from within outwardly, being 
energized by the marriage of good in the heart 
with truth in the understanding : while the lat- 
ter is purely voluntary, or expresses itself from 
without inwardly, being energized by the su- 
premacy of truth in the understanding to good 
in the heart. The spiritual subject accordingly 
is perfectly free, or incapable of coercing him- 
self; for when the heart prompts the under- 
standing, and the understanding seconds the 
heart, the hand acts as it were unconsciously, 
or without effort. The moral subject on the 
other hand, though he claims a felt or quasi free- 
dom, has not the least spiritual or real freedom, 
being perpetually required to force himself away 
from evil towards good : so that however good 
a matrix or womb of spiritual life his moral 
consciousness may prove to him, it ought never 
for a moment to be confounded with it. What 
is common to both forms of life, and what there- 



from Spiritual Life. 117 

fore renders the one strictly serviceable to the 
other, is, that they both imply the intensest pri- 
vacy, the intensest feeling of selfhood or indi- 
viduality in the subject. And what eternally 
distinguishes them is, that the moral subject, 
though he feel himself to be perfectly free or 
self-possessed is yet not truly so ; his apparent 
freedom or self-possession being wholly contin- 
gent upon an exact balance or equilibrium of 
good and evil Divinely enforced and maintained 
in his nature : so that if this equilibrium should 
become deranged by the rise of any bad habit 
on his part, his apparent freedom or self-suffi- 
ciency would merge in the grossest slavery to 
natural appetite and passion. 

But I fear that I am entering too suddenly 
for the reader's convenience into the heart of 
things ; and that his wishes would be best pro- 
moted by a more gradual movement. Let me 
then suppose the reader opening Swedenborg's 
books for the first time in total ignorance of what 
he is to find there; and then proceed to illustrate 
the probable influence they will exert upon his 
intelligence, by the effect they have produced 
upon my own. 



CHAPTER VII. 

What first arrests one's attention even in cur- 
sorily surveying Swedenborg's writings, is the 
necessity we are under, in order to attain to any 
accurate knowledge of spiritual order, of recti- 
fying certain rational prejudices we are wont to 
cherish in regard to Divine things ; just as we 
are bound, before attaining to a systematic view 
of cosmical order, to rectify certain sensuous prej- 
udices we are under with respect to Nature. If 
for example we go on to believe as our senses 
teach us, that the earth is the centre of planetary 
motion, the planetary orbs being all circumfer- 
ential to it, we shall never be able satisfactorily 
to systematize our knowledge, nor consequently 
to render it fruitful in practical application. So 
if we accept the testimony of the scientific rea- 
son in regard to God and his relation to us as 
absolute, we shall find our philosophic progress 
no less hindered than our scientific progress is 
hindered in the former case. For science con- 
trolled by sense, or what is equivalent, unenlight- 
ened by Revelation, affirms the absoluteness of 
morality, blinks out of sight the total and rigid 
subserviency it is under to God's spiritual ends 
in creation ; and hence arrays the creature in such 
absurd relations of independency towards God 



Spiritual incompetency of Reason, 119 

as practically to make creation unintelligible, 
and render all our heartiest beliefs on the subject 
fallacious and nugatory. Sense, which is indi- 
vidual observation, so long as it is unchecked 
by science, makes the sun revolve about the 
earth. And science which is associated obser- 
vation, so long as it is uncorrected by Revela- 
tion, makes God revolve about man, the creator 
about the creature, the infinite about the finite, 
turning Him into a mere rewarder of our merit 
towards Him and a punisher of our demerit. The 
natural reason suspends our spiritual destiny 
upon the measure of our moral righteousness ; 
upon the degree in which we are personally 
differenced from other men before God. It al- 
lows us hope towards God in so far as we are 
entitled to the love and admiration of our fel- 
lows, and shuts us up to despair in so far as 
we have forfeited these qualifications. In very 
truth however or according to Revelation, our 
spiritual character becomes lowered just as our 
moral righteousness, or favorable estimation by 
our fellow-men, becomes prized by us. Or what 
is the same thing, our true hope towards God is 
the measure of our despair in ourselves; the gos- 
pel invariably making salvation at God's hands 
the prerogative, not of high-flying saints by any 
means, but of low-lying sinners exclusively. 

This then is what we find in Swedenborg at 
the very start, the downright and complete re- 
versal of all our ordinary prejudices in regard to 
God's spiritual administration. Natural reason 
conceives of God as an omnipotent conjuror 



120 Nature involved in 

or magician, who is able at will to summon all 
existence, personal and real, moral and physical, 
out of sheer nothing. And it represents crea- 
tion consequently not as a strictly inevitable pro- 
cession of the Divine love and wisdom into some 
grandly unitary and responsive form of conscious- 
ness, but as a transient act of God's caprice, where- 
by He gives being to things which are uncon- 
scious, non-existent, nothing. We have all of 
us an undefined instinctive notion that God is 
a being not of the most faultlessly human pro- 
portions, but of this strictly magical faculty : 
and scarcely one in a thousand of us doubts, 
that creation was a mere brute irrational pro- 
cedure on His part, a stupendous freak of rest- 
lessness in fact or miraculous harlequinade, as 
essentially appreciable to the clod as to the 
seraph. 

Now Swedenborg's books replace this vul- 
gar conception of the subject by a spotless 
doctrine of Nature, calculated to release the 
mind from the bondage of superstition and 
build it up in pure spontaneous adoration of 
the Highest. He denies that God is the least 
bit of a conjuror, or possesses any magical power, 
that is, any power of instantaneous creation, 
any power of making something out of nothing. 
On the contrary he affirms and demonstrates that 
all true creatureship consists exclusively in a 
certain faculty of reaction or reciprocation which 
the creature possesses towards the creator; which 
faculty of course would be inconceivable in any 
but a spiritual form of existence. In other 



The Spiritual Creation. 121 

words the necessary marks of God's creature are 
freedom and rationality ; and as these character- 
istics qualify man alone, so man alone is God's 
true creature, all other forms of existence being 
involved in his form, and owing whatsoever they 
are and enjoy to its commanding universality. 
Thus nature derives its total significance from 
the human form, being in fact a strict and per- 
fect correspondence of all things in man ; being 
nothing more nor less than the spiritual or invis- 
ible contents of the human mind made phenome- 
nal to itself, rendered fixed and visible, and hence 
scientifically appreciable. In short man is the 
secret harmony or unity of Nature, so that any 
attempt to comprehend natural things indepen- 
dently of spiritual, or formulate a doctrine of 
Nature apart from the uses it subserves to the 
evolution of man's spiritual destiny, is to the 
last degree childish. The simple rectification 
of established prejudice which Swedenborg's 
books operate on this point alone, sheds a flood 
of light on our mental progress, and makes 
in fact the difference between day and night 
on every problem connected with man's origin 
and destiny. 

At all events my own intellect was a prey to 
habitual and extreme disquiet until I had learned 
it. I was born in the bosom of orthodoxy, and 
never knew a misgiving as to the perfect truth 
of its dogmas, until I had begun to prepare my- 
self for its professional ministry. Then I could 
no longer evade the enormous difficulties which 
inhered in its philosophy. I never felt a doubt 



122 Swedenborg makes Nature 

as to the grand fundamental truths it upheld, 
such as the creation, the fall, the redemption 
and the reconciliation of man. But I felt cer- 
tain that it maintained these verities in a most 
absurd and imbecile way, which was sure to dis- 
gust the unbribed understanding of men, and 
expose the benignant truths themselves to neg- 
lect if not discredit. But of course I felt my- 
self every way incompetent to stem the evil. 
I was sure that while orthodoxy had somehow 
succeeded to a celestial inheritance, it was yet a 
most unrighteous steward of that inheritance ; 
but how to dispossess it God alone knew. It 
was at this crisis of my intellectual fortunes that 
I encountered Swedenborg, whom I had been 
taught by my mistaken guides in theology to 
regard as half-fanatic and half-fool, and found 
in his doctrine of nature a complete extrication 
from my trouble. 

I was forcibly struck in my first cursory 
glances at these remarkable writings with the 
statement which everywhere pervades them, that 
the natural realm of creation, and not, as I had 
always supposed, its spiritual realm, was the true 
seat of God's creative power. In common with 
all theologians and philosophers, I had always 
supposed that the creative operation had refer- 
ence to us primarily as individuals, and only 
secondarily as a race ; or regarded us first mor- 
ally and afterwards socially: and hence inas- 
much as I perceived in myself great moral 
infirmity, that is, a ready proclivity under temp- 
tation to lying theft adultery and murder, my 



The Hand of God's Power. 123 

religious life had always been one of intense an- 
guish. Before making Swedenborg's acquaint- 
ance as I have already said, this excessive mental 
disquiet had led me to a deep though tacit dis- 
trust of the orthodox interpretation of the Chris- 
tian truth. I felt indeed a profound though for 
the most part helpless conviction that God would 
be one day discovered on the sinner's side ; and 
that the experiences of remorse and horror I 
was undergoing were diabolic infestations, rather 
than any legitimate operation of the Divine 
spirit within me. But however much my heart 
revolted, my intellect writhed ineffectually under 
the iron domination of the letter so dishonestly 
enforced and riveted by the church ; and I 
would at any moment have given my life for 
the ability to spiritualize, /. e. give a universal 
meaning to, statements so palpably limitary of the 
Divine supremacy as I found on the face of 
Revelation. 1 It was not till I had thoroughly 
explored these extraordinary books, and pene- 
trated to some extent the mines of condensed 
wisdom they embody, that I could succeed in 
shaking off my hereditary shackles to orthodoxy, 
or encounter without pale terror the menace of 
disaster and opprobrium with which, armed and 
inspired by the deepest hell, it strives every- 
where to harass and keep in bondage the human 
soul. 

1 Svvedenborg repeats with purity, tends ever away from 

what must seem sickening iter- person to the things signified by 

ation to those who are indifferent person : thus to universalize it- 

to the truth involved, that spirit- self, 
ual thought, in proportion to its 



124 Moral Righteousness incompatible 

The potent word of disenchantment for my 
intelligence, as I have already said, was this, 
namely : that God is diretlly related to us 
through our nature or what we have in common 
one with another ; and therefore inversely related 
to us through our moral parts or what we have 
in conscious distinction one from another. That 
is to say our natural individuality is a totally 
fallacious measure of Divine truth, until it has 
undergone the modification of the public or so- 
cial consciousness, and become converted thereby 
into a strictly spontaneous and productive force. 
I had always viewed the case strictly e converso. 
I had indeed long had an instinctive feeling of 
the truth in the letter of the gospels, where we 
see Christ invariably flogging the pretension of 
a moral or personal righteousness in man out of 
his sight ; and preferring any dilapidated harlot 
in whose heart a temper of unaffected humility 
has been Divinely quickened, to an unblemished 
doctor of divinity who yet lacks that precious 
leaven. But I had never caught a glimpse of 
its majestic philosophic import. Doubtless the 
reason was, that regarding Revelation itself as I 
did with the pinched and lethargic comprehension 
authorized by the church, I had never seen any- 
thing in it but a literal story about the birth life 
death resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, 
which being intended to commend him person- 
ally to our superstitious regard under very dire 
penalties, by that very fact of course emptied 
itself of all philosophic or properly human and 
spiritual significance. I say "of course," be- 



with Spiritual Innocence. \2$ 

cause truth admits no spiritual sanction to our 
intelligence but the good it reveals to the heart; 
and if accordingly it disclaim this sanction, and 
seek to get itself honored by an appeal to our 
hopes and fears, it at once forfeits its aspect of 
inspired scripture, and sinks into the dimensions 
of ordinary literature. 

I do not hesitate then to avow my own obli- 
gations to Swedenborg for the first clear intel- 
lectual insight I got into the gospel; and for 
the thoroughly philosophic justification which 
thence befell my long cherished and profound 
experimental conviction of the essentially loath- 
some character of our moral righteousness. He 
showed me for the first time the inevitably fal- 
lacious nature of the moral instinct, by demon- 
strating the altogether subordinate and mediato- 
rial part it plays in the evolution of our spiritual 
destiny. I had never for a moment intelleclually 
realized my moral consciousness to be that mere 
steward or servant of the Divine inheritance in 
our nature, which Swedenborg showed it to be. 
On the contrary with the intellect, and in spite 
of the heart's misgiving, I had always quietly 
allowed it to be the undeniable lord of the in- 
heritance, and beheld it accordingly whipping the 
men-servants and the maid-servants at its pleas- 
ure, without a suspicion. Far from supposing 
my natural selfhood or proprium to constitute 
a strictly negative token, an essentially inverse 
attestation, of God's spiritual and infinite pres- 
ence in our nature, I habitually viewed it as the 
church taught me to view it, that is, as the only 



126 Hhe Law is intended 

direct and positive manifestation of His power: 
and my religious life accordingly became one of 
incessant conflict and perturbation. 

How could it have been otherwise ? Having 
as I supposed a purely moral status by creation 
— never dreaming that my selfhood possessed 
only a formal or subjective validity — I attribu- 
ted to myself an objective or substantial reality 
in God's sight, and of course sought to attract 
His approbation to me, by the unswerving pur- 
suit of moral excellence, by studiously cultivat- 
ing every method of personal purity. It was 
all in vain. The more I strove to indue myself 
in actual righteousness, the wider gaped the jaws 
of hell within me; the fouler grew its fetid 
breath. A conviction of inward defilement so 
sheer took possession of me, that death seemed 
better than life. I soon found my conscience, 
once launched in this insane career, acquiring so 
infernal an edge, that I could no longer indulge 
myself in the most momentary deviation from 
an absurd and pedantic literal rectitude — could 
not for example bestow a sulky glance upon my 
wife, a cross word upon my child, or a petulant 
objurgation on my cook — without tumbling 
into an instant inward frenzy of alarm, lest I 
should thereby have provoked God's personal 
malignity to me. There is indeed no way of 
avoiding spiritual results so belittling, but by 
ceasing to regard morality as a direct, and look- 
ing upon it as an inverse, image of God's true 
life in us. If my moral consciousness constitute 
the true and eternal bond of intercourse between 



to minuter Death. 127 

me and God ; that is to say, if He attribute to 
me all the good and evil which I in my insane 
pride attribute to myself: then it will be impos- 
sible for me to avoid to all eternity, either a 
most conceited and disgusting conviction of His 
personal complacency in me ; or else a shudder- 
ing apprehension of His personal ill-will. If I 
have a naturally complacent temper my religious 
life will reflect it, and array me spiritually in all 
manner of nauseous Pharisaism and flunkeyism. 
If I have what is called a "morbid" natural 
temperament, on the other hand, leading me to 
self-distrust and self-depreciation, my religious 
life will deepen these things into despair, by 
making my self-condemnation confess itself a 
feeble reflection of God's profounder vindictive- 
ness. 

Here however was a truth which traversed 
my sensuous superstition from top to bottom, 
showing me that inasmuch as my moral con- 
sciousness itself was but an inverse, never a 
direct, exponent of spiritual truth or substance, 
so a fortiori every derivation from that conscious- 
ness claimed a precisely similar interpretation : 
thus that my self-righteousness and my self-con- 
demnation attested in every case a strictly in- 
verse never a dirett judgment of the Divine 
mind towards me ; the former being an invari- 
able evidence of His inward or spiritual remote- 
ness from me ; the latter of His inward or spir- 
itual nearness. Fed only by sense (symbolically 
the serpent) or, what is the same thing, unenlight- 
ened by Revelation, my religious conscience had 



12.3 Moral Force Characterizes us 

always reported me as having life in myself, /'. e. 
as being my own substance no less than my own 
form. And, consequently, whenever the great 
pent-up fires of natural appetite and passion 
sought vent in any volcanic devastating floods 
through the petty mountain-tops of my moral- 
ity, through the chinks and crevices of my pig- 
my personality, I, having no discernment of my 
proper insignificance in the premises, /. e. of the 
utter disproportion between my personal dimen- 
sions and the great underlying breadth of human 
nature itself; incontinently appropriated its stu- 
pendous contents to myself, and like a sublimer 
Jack Horner stupidly marvelled to think, how 
odious a person I must all the while be becom- 
ing to the Divine mind. But here at last came 
a fragrant breath of heaven, came a fragrant 
breath indeed from above the heaven of heavens, 
blowing away this "damned dust" of sense from 
my soul, and teaching me to see that no possi- 
bility existed of any one being either personally 
good or personally evil to the Divine mind ; 
since personality itself was a purely subjective 
or formal experience of man, and had not the 
least spiritual title therefore to determine its own 
objective or substantial contents. 

The basis of Natural Religion is this pride 
of morality ; this habitually fallacious estimate 
we put upon the dignity of our natural individ- 
uality. Born in complete ignorance of spiritual 
things, having no conception of the essential 
servility our moral experience is under to the 
needs of a superior spiritual life, we suppose 






in the Infancy of our Development. 129 

that it is a point of really Divine order that man 
should always be invested with the control of 
his nature, with the responsibility of his natural 
appetites and passions : the Divine complacency 
in him being measured by the degree in which 
he exercises such control. The truth however 
is that our moral force is called for only during 
the infancy of human development, or while the 
social sentiment is still so immature in our bo- 
soms, that no scientific countenance is afforded 
to the suggestion of God's vital presence in our 
nature. So long of course as God remains a 
wholly unrecognized glory in humanity : or 
while the still undeveloped forms of our rich 
spontaneous activity hide, instead of plainly re- 
vealing, His infinite spiritual indwelling in our 
very nature itself, and moreover in the lowest 
things of that nature preeminently ; we of course 
exaggerate the worth of the moral or voluntary 
life; and suppose that the interests of human 
individuality are indissolubly pledged to its per- 
manence. 

No judgment can be more fallacious. Human 
individuality is then at its lowest ebb : in other 
words our experience of evil is then most abun- 
dant and overpowering : when the moral force 
in us is supreme ; or has not as yet been chas- 
tened refined and glorified by the progress of 
human society equality or fellowship, into spon- 
taneous or aesthetic form. But // is not in man 
that walketh to direcl his steps ; and we accord- 
ingly during all our philosophic nonage take for 
granted the primary postulate of consciousness, 



130 By the Law alone 

which is, that we are our own vital substance as 
well as derivative form ; our own inward reality 
as well as outward phenomenality. Conscious- 
ness reports the selfhood as a finality, as given 
to us for its own sake or absolutely, and by no 
means in the interests of a superior Divine end. 
The symbolic voice of God in Eden said to 
Adam : " In the day you eat of the tree of the 
knowledge of good and evil, you shall surely die:" 
which, being philosophically interpreted, means 
that so far as a man is satisfied with himself, 

AS MORALLY CONSTITUTED TO HIS OWN INTELLI- 
GENCE, he nourishes a sentiment of independence 
towards God, and disunion towards his neigh- 
bor ; and to that extent immerses himself in 
pride s which is spiritual death. On the other 
hand the symbolic voice of the serpent (which 
means the lowest of our mental forms ; the im- 
agination conversant with the mere appearances 
of things, and ignorant of their spiritual import; 
the poetic faculty, in short :) pipes an encourag- 
ing tune. It says: ''The tree is good for food, pleas- 
ant to the eyes, and much to be desired to make one 
wise : and if you will only eat heartily of it you 
will become like God, knowing good and evil.'" 
That is to say, dropping metaphor and speaking 
truth, the sensuous imagination in us, which 
means our faculty of mistaking appearance for 
reality, affirms the absolute or independent char- 
acter of the selfhood as a truth of reason; in- 
sists so speciously upon its intrinsic validity or 
essential insubordination to all ulterior spiritual 
issues, as to persuade us that we have only got 



is the Knowledge of Sin. 131 

diligently to cultivate and cherish it, in order to 
come into the image of God's perfection : thus on 
the one hand degrading God from an infinite or 
spiritual and therefore purely creative relation 
towards us, to a finite or moral and therefore 
purely reactive agency : while on the other hand 
blinding us to the essential subserviency our 
moral development is under, to the needs of a 
signal Divine redemption which is yet to illus- 
trate our nature, and lift it into immortal con- 
junction with God. 

Now religion is no doubt a quasi consecration 
of these sensuous instincts of our intelligence. 
It is an apparent Divine authentication of this 
madness of the natural heart, which prompts us 
to expect God's infinite approbation upon our 
strictly finite and differential endowments. But 
this religious consecration of the moral instinct 
takes place not in the interests of that instinct, 
but only in those of our eventual living and 
spiritual emancipation from it. God does in- 
deed formally ratify the moral consciousness in 
us ; but then it is by imposing upon it a ritual 
and figurative drapery of sacrifice and lustration, 
which inwardly falsifies its pretension and reveals 
its utter spiritual hollowness. He apparently 
sanctions the claim we put forth of a capacity 
of personal approximation to His perfection ; 
/. e. allows our pride of selfhood to inflate itself 
to the extent of expecting and soliciting His 
personal countenance and approbation. But 
this apparent sanction turns out a very real 
curse, since the sincere worshipper no sooner 



132 Delight in Ritual Righteousness 

attempts to realize the legal or accredited right- 
eousness, and so achieve his coveted personal 
nearness to God, than he finds himself subjected 
not merely to a permanent priestly mediation 
which of itself falsifies his personal aspiration, 
but also to a perpetual discipline of cleansing 
and oblation, which leaves him in no doubt that 
death and not life is the righteous meed of every 
attempt to compass a literal or actual fulfilment 
of God's law, and so secure a personal title to 
His favor. 

The letter of the Divine law wears a very 
easy and seductive aspect to the carnal under- 
standing; and you will accordingly find it true as 
a general rule, that no more grovelling swine 
exist, figuratively speaking, than those which 
are fattened upon the spiritual husks that go to 
constitute the body of any existing ritual, Chris- 
tian or Pagan, and are content with that base 
nutriment. But to spiritual eyes, that is, to an 
affettionate discernment, this carnal letter of 
righteousness covers over such abysses of spirit- 
ual disease disorder and death in the satisfied 
votary, as to announce itself on its very face a 
purely prophetic or prospective economy; a mere 
figure for the time then being, of a very real 
because spiritual renovation which human nature 
itself is creatively bound to exhibit at the Di- 
vine hands. The mere ecclesiastic, the man 
who is satisfied with his ritual righteousness 
because it hides his spiritual raggedness from 
his own eyes, or keeps him on the best possible 
terms with himself, attributes of course a posi- 



Fatal to Spiritual Discernment. 133 

tive sanctity, a direct worth, to religion, as mor- 
ally uniting God and the worshipper. The 
spiritual man on the other hand (the man who 
rejects the ritual righteousness for the same rea- 
son which leads the carnal man to embrace it, 
that is, because it conceals his spiritual naked- 
ness :) attributes to religion a purely figurative 
sanctity, a purely negative validity, which is 
that of morally disuniting God and the wor- 
shipper ; so shutting up the latter's hope to that 
Divine promise of a spiritual renewing, of his 
nature, which is the sole legitimate antidote to 
the despair of the honest religious conscience, 
and which alone is worthy therefore of any rea- 
sonable being's regard or confidence. 

Religion then, so far from really authenticat- 
ing the moral instinct in its upward soarings, or 
vindicating its votary's personal claim to the Di- 
vine consideration, is intent upon practically ex- 
orcising such claim, by exposing the endless 
depths of spiritual profligacy which are involved 
in it. True religion has no force spiritually but 
to dislodge from our minds the conception of a 
literal righteousness, of a finite sanctity, among 
men, such as may distinguish one man from an- 
other in the Divine sight ; substituting in place 
of it the recognition of a Divinely wrought and 
therefore spotless innocence in our very nature 
itself; based upon a sentiment of the frankest 
fellowship, of the most intimate unity and equal- 
ity of every man with every other man. If 
hereupon any one be disposed to ask why, in 
this state of things, God accords even a quasi 



134 ® ur Spiritual Creation Contingent 

consecration, even a temporary indulgence, to 
the moral instinct, instead of utterly obliterating 
it from sight : the answer is, that He does so for 
the same reason that prompts the architect to 
excavate a foundation for his house before he 
puts the house up ; namely, to insure its perma- 
nence or stability. As the foundation of a 
house, if it be well laid, permits and subserves 
any amount of development in the superstruc- 
ture, so our moral existence, in freely promoting 
our rational evolution, essentially subserves our 
eventual spiritual manhood. For the moral sen- 
timent in furnishing us as it does with a spiritual 
or interior development so exactly inversive of 
God's own spirit, both becomes a veracious basis 
of consciousness for us to all eternity, and ipsofafto 
presents to God that exact form or mould which 
He requires in order to the communication of 
His spiritual substance to us, and the consequent 
building us up in the deathless fellowship of His 
perfection. 

In a word our creation by God in His own 
image, necessarily involves our redemption from 
our own nature ; involves our elevation out of 
mere physical and moral into social and aesthetic, 
consciousness. For if as I have shown we are 
the offspring of a perfect love, we are bound of 
course sooner or later to reflect or reproduce such 
perfection. An infinite or perfect love means a 
love which is wholly unlimited by self-love, or 
is so essentially incapable of respecting self as 
to go forth incessantly in vivifying or giving 
being to whatsoever is intrinsically contrary to 



upon our Natural Redemption. 135' 

itself. If then God our creator be of this 
amazing quality, if His love be so truly infi- 
nite as to be love itself, love without one 
conceivable fibre of self-love, then clearly He 
cannot be content merely to give us being 
or render us self-conscious. He must also 
give us form, or make our self-consciousness 
reflect and attest His own perfection. As it 
is said in Genesis ii. 3 He creates us only to 
make us. Being Himself a spirit of infinite 
Love, He cannot be content with anything 
short of an answering spirit in our bosoms, 
however contrary they be in themselves to 
it ; a spirit of genuine fellowship with our 
kind which shall swallow up our native selfish- 
ness, and make us each in our degree forms 
of creative benignity. Simply because God 
Himself is a being so perfect in love — /. e. 
so incapable of loving Himself, and so consid- 
erate only of what is not Himself — as to be 
really creative, we His creatures can come into 
His likeness only in so far as our natural genera- 
tion becomes the basis of a spiritual regenera- 
tion; or what is the same thing, only in so far 
as our native impotence and imbecility become 
exchanged, for a cultivated power and wisdom. 
And the indispensable condition of this change 
is, that our natural self-seeking become swal- 
lowed up in the interests of our higher social 
unity; that out of selfish beings we be made 
social beings ; that we disown our native pride 
and independence for a spirit of exact equality 
with our brethren ; that we unlearn in truth our 



136 We are Born to be Re-born. 

moral righteousness, a righteousness which in- 
heres in ourselves as finitely constituted, that is, 
as spiritually disunited with our fellow-man and 
God, and cultivate a purely social righteousness, 
a righteousness in ourselves as in-finitely consti- 
tuted, that is, as redeemed from our base natural 
temper of mind, and spiritually united with our 
fellow-man and God. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Many people suppose that moral and social 
are two words for one and the same thing: 
whereas they express ideas exactly inversive of 
each other, being reciprocally related as shell and 
kernel, base and superstructure, letter and spirit. 
Morality expresses the sentiment I have of my 
own absoluteness, the feeling I have of a self- 
hood strictly independent of every other man. 
Society on the other hand expresses the senti- 
ment I have of my strict unity with every other 
man, a unity so absolute and commanding as to 
stamp my moral force wholly good or wholly evil 
simply as it obeys or disobeys its behests. In 
short the one sentiment finites me in the greatest 
possible measure; the other in-finites me in equal 
measure. 

Our morality does not make us social beings 
any more than the foundation of a house makes 
the house ; any more than the shell of a nut 
makes the nut ; any more than the mould of a 
frieze makes the frieze ; in short any more than 
the mother makes the child. It merely gives 
us on the contrary that ample individual devel- 
opment and nursing, that affluent preliminary 
experience of our finite selves, which is neces- 
sary to base or engender our subsequent unlim- 



138 Morality a Preparation for 

ited social expansion. It lifts us out of the mud 
of animality, out of the mire of mere natural 
passion and appetite, and endows us with self- 
hood or soul, that is, with the sense of a life so 
much more intimate and near than that of the 
body, as to lead us to identify ourselves with it 
or to cleave to it alone, cheerfully forsaking all 
things for it. Thus morality extricates us from 
the life of mineral vegetable and animal ; gives 
us commanding selfhood or freedom, freedom 
to be not what our fathers and mothers make 
us, as is the case with the brute, but whatsoever 
we ourselves choose to become : so allying us 
to our own inexperienced imaginations with 
God ; giving us that sentiment of individual 
power and glory which is unknown to the ani- 
mal nature, and which is the coarse rude germ 
of all our subsequent conceptions of spiritual 
things; whispering in short in our fondest hearts, 
Te shall be as God knowing good and evil. In a 
word, morality is the power which every man 
as man possesses, to rise above those natural lim- 
itations which bind all lower existence, and ap- 
pear himself alone, unrelated to any one else. 

Self-assertion is thus so clearly the fundamen- 
tal law, the vital breath, of our moral life, that 
it is no wonder we cling to that life as the true 
end of our being, and require an internal Divine 
quickening, or the denunciatory voice of con- 
science, before we consent to regard it simply as 
a means to an infinitely higher end, which is our 
unity with all mankind. The inspiration of the 
moral sentiment, the sentiment of selfhood, is 



our Spiritual Regeneration. 139 

so powerful within us ; it is so sweet to feel this 
delicious bosom inmate disengage itself from its 
gross carnal envelope, and come forth a radiant 
white-armed Eve full formed in all Divine vigor 
and beauty, that we cannot help clasping it to 
our bosoms as thenceforth bone of our bone and 
flesh of our flesh, cheerfully forsaking for it 
father and mother ; or all we have traditionally 
loved and traditionally believed ; and cleaving 
undismayed to its fortunes though it lead us 
through the gloom of death and the fires of 
hell. 

But just this irresistible sweetness of the self- 
hood, or moral force, in us, is what makes it all 
the more a snare to us, if it be considered a final 
and not a mediate gift of God : /. e. if it be al- 
lowed to control in place of simply serving the 
social sentiment to which alone it is Divinely 
tributary. Accordingly every man whose aspi- 
rations are elevated above the ground, every man 
who desires above all things to ally himself spir- 
itually with the Divine spirit, finds his great con- 
troversy to lie with himself; with this moral 
temper of his own mind ; finds the sole hin- 
drance of his aspirations to lie in this ferocious 
pride of selfhood, which is indeed an every way 
indispensable soil for the future spiritual plant, 
but a soil nevertheless from which the plant is 
bound sedulously to grow away. Such a man 
perceives at once that his moral life is not the 
end of his being, but on the contrary a wholly 
subordinate means to that end, which is spiritual 
life or cultivated conformity to God, growing 



140 Morality the Subjett Earth 

out of his unaffected acknowledgment of hu- 
man unity: so that far from cherishing the pride 
which is instinctive to morality, pride of self- 
hood, pride of character, pride of differential 
righteousness, he daily unlearns that foolish 
conceit, and cultivates instead relations of the 
tenderest amity and equality with all other 
men. 

It is very easy to see then that the pride of 
morality is just as sure to stifle God's true life in 
us which is the social life, unless we keep dili- 
gent watch over it, as the cellars of our houses 
are sure to poison the air of the upper stories, 
unless we bestir ourselves to keep them dry and 
clean. Self-love is the vital atmosphere of mo- 
rality and there can be no extrication from it but 
by honest conflict with it, conflict if need be 
even unto death. Some men have been more 
grievously lacerated in this conflict than others, 
going down to their graves scourged by the con- 
tempt of the proud and unthinking, with ban- 
ners once so lofty now all trailing in the dust of 
men's reproach. But this is not because they 
were spiritually any worse than other men ; 
probably the exact contrary : it is only because 
they had fifty times the ordinary amount of 
moral or self-righteous force to start with, and 
it could only become spiritually weakened and 
overcome by this terrific personal humiliation. 
For every man in the exact ratio of his moral 
force is implicitly and of necessity full of self-con- 
fidence, full of pride in himself, and therefore ex- 
plicitly whenever occasion offers full of contempt 



of Spiritual Existence. 141 

towards others. 1 And he becomes spiritually re- 
generated, or inwardly conjoined with God, only 
by honestly subjecting the base instinct to culture: 
which means, compelling himself into relations of 
the frankest equity with all mankind. 

Morality is thus only the subject earth of spir- 
itual existence; just as animality is that of moral 
existence, and vegetality that of animal exist- 
ence, and minerality that of vegetable existence. 
All existence real and personal is thus hierar- 
chically distributed, each successive form being 
a natural unit or marriage of two discordant 
forces, and becoming by its own subsequent spir- 
itual variety the basis in its turn of a still higher 
unity. The lower forms in every case are what 
give subjective or constitutional identity (that is, 
body) to the higher form. The higher form 
again in its turn is what gives objective or crea- 
tive individuality (that is, soul) to the lower 
forms. The mineral gives material existence, 
or body to the vegetable ; but the vegetable 
gives spiritual being or soul to the mineral, by 

1 I know that these broad state- redeemed natural mind, the mere 
ments of the evil pertaining to conscience of disunion which ex- 
human nature will affront the ists between man and God by 
distinctively religious develop- nature, but rather that nascent 
ment of our day and generation, regenerate consciousness of the 
which is the Unitarian one : but race which is being vitalized by 
I take a pungent satisfaction nev- the advancing tides of God's 
ertheless in making the line of holy spirit in humanity, the spirit 
demarcation between the two of human society fellowship or 
doctrines sharp and clear, be- equality. It is this consideration 
oause it should always be re- which, leaving Unitarianism to- 
membered that Unitarianism in tally imbecile as a philosophic 
so far forth as it is a genuine doctrine, yet makes it blessedly 
outbirth of our intellectual his- significant and welcome as an 
tory, reflects no longer the un- historic fact. 



142 Natural Existences Forms of Use. 

calling forth its uses to a higher unity. The 
vegetable gives material existence or body to 
the animal form, which latter again endows the 
vegetable with spiritual life or soul, in calling 
forth its uses to a superior style of being. So 
the animal in like manner gives visible or bodily 
constitution to man, while man gives invisible 
or spiritual soul to the animal kingdom by evok- 
ing its various uses to his own higher develop- 
ment. And so also man in his turn gives visi- 
ble form or bodily manifestation to God, while 
God again gives creative substance, soul, or 
unity to man in calling forth man's various sub- 
serviency to His own infinite and uncreated 
unity. 

All natural existence may be classified into 
forms of use ; all spiritual existence into forms 
of power. Every real existence, whatsoever we 
rightly denominate a thing as addressing any of 
our senses, is a form of use to superior exist- 
ence. Every spiritual existence, whatsoever we 
rightfully denominate a person as addressing our 
interior perception, is a form of power over 
inferior existence. Thus the vegetable on its 
material side is a form of use to the animal 
kingdom, as giving it sustenance ; while on its 
spiritual side it is a form of power over the 
mineral kingdom, as compelling it into the ser- 
vice of its own distinctive individuality. The 
animal again on its visible or corporeal side is a 
purely subjective implication of the human form, 
while on its spiritual or invisible side it furnishes 
the creative unity or objectivity of the vegeta- 



Spiritual Existences Forms of Power. 143 

ble world. So again man while on his natural 
side he furnishes a helpless platform or basis to 
the manifestation of God's perfection, yet as to 
his spiritual or individual aptitudes he compels 
not merely the animal but all the lower king- 
doms of nature to bear resistless testimony to his 
power. 

But in thus classifying all natural existence 
into forms of use, and all spiritual existence into 
forms of power, we must not forget to observe 
that the use promoted by the one class is never 
absolutely but only relatively good, nor the 
power exerted by the other class absolutely but 
only relatively benignant. That is to say, it is 
good and benignant not in itself, but in opposi- 
tion to something else. Thus every natural 
form is a form of use, but some of these uses 
are relatively to others good, and some evil. 
Some minerals nourish vegetation, others starve 
it. Some vegetables enrich animal life, others 
poison it. Some animals again are cheerfully 
serviceable to human life, others fiercely inimi- 
cal to it So also when we contemplate human 
nature we find some of its forms relatively ac- 
cordant with the Divine perfection, others rela- 
tively to these prior ones again most discordant; 
the former exerting a decidedly benignant influ- 
ence upon whatever is subject to them, the latter 
exerting a decidedly malignant influence. 

This contrarious aspect both of nature and 
man has given rise, as the reader well knows, 
to a great amount of unsatisfactory specula- 
tion, because men have scarcely known how, 



144 Nature s Discords 

apart from the light of Revelation, to shape 
their speculations into accordance with the de- 
mands of the Divine unity. The demand of 
unity in the creator is so peremptory and inflex- 
ible, that the mind utterly refuses in the long 
run to acquiesce in any scheme of creation which 
leaves creation divided, or puts the creator in 
permanent hostility with any portion of His 
work. More than this. The mind not only 
rejects these puerile cosmologies which leave the 
creator at war with His own creature, but it 
goes further and insists, by an inevitable presen- 
timent of the great philosophic verity, that 
wherever we find a sphere of life antagonistic 
with itself, the antagonism is purely phenome- 
nal : /. e. is not final, does not exist for its own 
sake but only in the interest of some higher 
unity. Thus the good and evil attributable to 
mineral existence are not absolute, do not attach 
to the mineral itself, but only to its relative sub- 
serviency or contrariety to the needs of vegeta- 
ble existence. So the good and evil attributable 
to vegetable forms bear reference exclusively to 
the difference of bearing they exert upon ani- 
mal existence ; while the good and evil again 
of animal existence attach not to the animal 
forms themselves, but only to the positive or 
negative relation they sustain to the human 
form. 

The same rule holds in regard to moral exist- 
ence, though the nonsensical pride we feel in 
ourselves habitually blinds us to the fact. I am 
not a bad man morally, and you a good man, 



harmonized in Man. 145 

by virtue of any absolute or essential difference 
between us, but altogether by virtue of the dif- 
ference in our relation to that great unitary life 
of God in our nature, which we call society, 
fraternity, fellowship, equality, and which from 
the beginning of human history has been strug- 
gling to work itself, by means of this strictly 
subjective antagonism, into final perfect and ob- 
jective recognition : you as a morally good man 
being positively related to that life ; I as a mor- 
ally evil one being negatively related to it. The 
needs of this great life — which alone manifests 
God's spiritual presence in our nature — require 
the utmost conceivable intensity of human free- 
dom; require in other words that man should be 
spontaneously good, good of himself, good with- 
out any antagonism of evil, infinitely good even 
as God is good. But clearly if we had had no 
preliminary acquaintance with imperfect or finite 
good, good as related to evil, we should be desti- 
tute of power to appreciate or even apprehend this 
higher and perfect good. If we had not first 
suffered, and suffered too most poignantly, from 
the experience of evil in ourselves as morally, 
i. e. finitely, constituted, constituted in reciprocal 
independency each of every other, we should 
have been utterly unable even to discern that 
ineffable Divine and infinite good which is yet 
to be revealed in us as socially, /. e. infinitely 
constituted, constituted in the closest reciprocal 
unity of all with each and each with all. 

Even as nature's discords then bid us look up- 
wards to man in order to find their point of ad- 



146 Our Moral Discords 

justment or unity, so the discords of our moral 
nature bid us look higher still, namely to the 
Lord or Divine natural man, in whose tran- 
scendent personality all these discords are finally 
appeased. Nature's contrarieties reflect her in- 
trinsic subordination to the needs of human life. 
In the same way our moral differences imply no 
absolute merit or demerit in us, but simply re- 
flect the diversity of our actual relation to that 
great social destiny in which we are all alike 
Divinely bound up. 

Our social manhood is thus the true travail of 
the redeemer's soul. This at last is Christ's 
great life become ours, God's holy name hal- 
lowed in our bosoms, His benignant kingdom 
come in the plenitude of its power, and His 
gracious will done on earth, the earth of the 
natural mind, as faultlessly as it has hitherto 
been done in heaven, the heaven of the spirit- 
ual mind. For the social sentiment, the senti- 
ment of human society, human brotherhood, 
human equality, exhibits the two warring loves 
of the human bosom, self-love and neighborly 
love, interest and principle, pleasure and duty, 
in such perfect unison as that neither can possi- 
bly prompt anything contrary to the other, but 
both alike stand eternally pledged to the promo- 
tion of an entirely new spirit in man, a spirit of 
the widest fellowship, of the freest and tender- 
est unity with every other man. This social 
development constitutes an absolutely new na- 
ture in man, a Divinely renewed heart and 
mind, which shall make all Divine ways easy to 



harmonized in Society, 147 

follow. " In those days,'" says the promise, 1 " J 
will put my law in their inward parts, and write 
it on their hearts" And where the heart prompts 
it, obedience of course is sure. The same ex- 
alted truth was prefigured by the legal sacrifices 
in which all things were purged with blood ; 
the blood of the sacrificial victim representing 
the renewed affections of the worshipper, which 
would finally redeem him from outward defile- 
ment, and unite him with God. 

Thus I have no hesitation in avowing my 
conviction that the total problem of creation 
infallibly merges in the social problem, inevita- 
bly leads us to regard a perfect society or fellow- 
ship among men as the one grand aim of God's 
providence on earth, to which of course our 
moral and religious history has been strictly 
incidental and tributary. For society is the 
guardian of our destiny as a race, the race hav- 
ing as rigid a unity as any of its individual 
members ; and society is the only fitting and 
intelligible form of this unity. We are wont 
to say that the being of God consists in His 
unity, in His being the all of life, and therefore 
excluding community; the very perfection or 
infinitude of this unity consisting in the fact, 
that of the two elements which logically com- 
pose it, individuality and universality, the former 
or feminine element controls and involves the 
latter or masculine element. In like manner, 
though inversely, we may say that the essence 
of nature is community, i. e. a unity which each 

1 Jer. 31. 



148 Man's Social Development 

of her subjects shares equally with every other, 
and hence excludes all true or spiritual individ- 
uality : her very imperfection or finiteness being 
demonstrable from the fact that of the two ele- 
ments which go logically to constitute her com- 
munity, each and all, or individuality and univer- 
sality, the latter or masculine element effectually 
dominates and swallows up the former or femi- 
nine element. Now our moral history is but 
the actual arrangement and bringing forth to 
sight of this immense but unsuspected dearth 
of spirituality in nature ; is only the gradual 
draining off and exhaustion of our latent natu- 
ral worthlessness and imbecility, in order to our 
eventual thorough impletion with all Divine 
goodness wisdom and power. The sole mis- 
sion of conscience (which is a limitation of the 
moral sentiment, the sentiment of what is due 
to oneself, by the social sentiment, the senti- 
ment of what is due to one's neighbor,) has 
been to give us true self-knowledge, and so 
qualify us for the true knowledge of God. This 
it does by vivifying within our individual bos- 
oms this communistic animus of the race, or 
bringing into sharp actuality the perfect disre- 
spect which every merely natural man feels for 
his brother. Its efficacy is however distinctly 
purgative not nutritive. Its invariable burden 
is to prove to its subject that he, by virtue sim- 
ply of his natural genesis, and apart from God's 
redeeming presence and operation in his nature, 
seeks as far as in him lies to subjugate all man- 
kind to himself, and to appropriate to his own 



the outcome of Redemption. 149 

ostentatious uses all the wealth of nature. Con- 
science is thus an indisputable ministry of 
death, universal death to every child of Adam 
that obeys it : but of course this death in our- 
selves as finitely constituted, as carnally pro- 
nounced, as morally characterized, is purely 
incidental and transitory, being in fact but 
the needful background or anchorage which 
our inexperience requires in order to our grasp 
of that endless and perfect life in ourselves 
which we realize as socially constituted, as spir- 
itually pronounced, as aesthetically characterized, 
in the second Adam. For when our moral ex- 
perience has run itself dry, that is to say, when 
it has revealed to us the abysses of spiritual dis- 
ease disorder and death we are in by nature, it 
becomes so enfeebled as no longer to offer any 
opposition to the access of the social sentiment 
in our bosoms, by which we finally become ele- 
vated out of this chaotic natural communism into 
orderly human proportions, and so made a taber- 
nacle worthy of the creator's amplest indwelling. 
Our experience avouches the utter incompati- 
bility of the moral sentiment (regarded as a life- 
giving power) with the social sentiment; it be- 
ing manifestly impossible that any one should 
feel the spiritual brotherhood or equality of an- 
other, to whom at the same time he feels him- 
self morally or personally superior. The prog- 
ress of human society accordingly, the ever- 
deepening sentiment of human fellowship, is 
fast obliterating our moral manhood, 1 that petty 

l See Appendix, Note A. 



150 The Moral Sentiment destined 

manhood which stands in the conception of a 
purely personal merit and demerit among men. 
It is this infirm conception which has organized 
all the institutions of the old world, and is now 
fast leaving them to their righteous doom with- 
out the meed of a disinterested sigh or tear. In 
the new world which is opening its pearly gates 
for the redeemed of the Lord to enter, that great 
city, the holy Jerusalem, which is even now de- 
scending from God out of heaven having all 
the glory of God, "neither circumcision availeth 
anything nor uncircumcision, but a new crea- 
ture : " /. e. a mind of such frank and fearless 
fellowship with whatsoever bears the name of 
man, as makes all virtue to lie in the practical 
recognition of human equality and all vice in 
its denial. There and then of course every 
man will prove by the simple force of his man- 
hood alone, an every way worthy subject of the 
Divine infinitude. 

The endowment of man with this renovated 
or Divine-natural form, is much more than equiv- 
alent to all the advantage which has hitherto 
accrued from his isolated individual regeneration, 
because it exhibits a fulfilment where the latter 
exhibited only a pledge or promise. The im- 
portance of regeneration as a principle of the 
Divine administration ; its public interest as dis- 
tinguished from its private incidental interest to 
its personal subject; lay exclusively in the fur- 
therance it always ministered to the precise re- 
sult here contemplated, namely, the inauguration 
of a perfect human society or fellowship. It 



to Social Glorification, 151 

was an implicit recognition of human fellowship 
when as yet there was no explicit recognition of 
it possible ; a negative religious expression of 
the truth when as yet there could be no positive 
scientific expression of it, when as yet in short 
the great truth of human brotherhood was wholly 
submerged under the natural communism of the 
race, or at best held in mute abeyance to mere 
ecclesiastical and political usage. So long as 
the Divine truth lay latent and unsuspected 
under these tenacious carnal coverings ; so long 
as the spotless inward innocence and boundless 
outward power to which universal man is des- 
tined by virtue of his derivation from infinite 
Love and Wisdom, lay wrapped up concealed 
and almost stifled under these rude symbolic husks 
of priest and king, or else came forth only to be 
universally discredited reviled and crucified : so 
long of course the individual spiritual regenera- 
tion of man was the most sacred of truths, be- 
cause it furnished the sole armory to the Divine 
spirit whereby to combat evil in the human 
bosom, or precipitate self-love from its usurped 
supremacy over neighborly love. The regener- 
ate spirit is one of the strictest fellowship or 
equality: that is to say, it prompts its subject 
invariably to forbear doing to others what he 
would not have others do to himself, and invari- 
ably to do to others what he would have others 
do to him. This is a truly regenerate temper 
in man, because naturally every man loves him- 
self more than others, and so far as he can pru- 
dently do so uses the possessions and even the 



152 Individual Regeneration a Fruit 

person of another as his own. The essentially 
communistic quality of nature renders this ani- 
mus inevitable. Accordingly unless the Divine 
Providence had all along the course of history 
singled out such persons as were capable of spir- 
itual regeneration without detriment to their 
conscious freedom, evil would have reigned 
uncontrolled throughout history, and creation 
consequently have been stifled in a vain effort 
to get birth or put on form. In short self-love 
which is the vital principle of communism (hell), 
would have forever dominated neighborly-love 
which is the vital principle of individuality 
(heaven) ; and thus not merely man's moral life 
which is the strict neutrality or indifference of 
heaven and hell would have been impossible, 
but d fortiori his social life to which the moral 
life serves but as a transition, and which itself 
involves the intimate and eternal fusion of heav- 
en and hell in a new and Divine-natural person- 
ality of man, would have been forever defeated. 
We have only to glance in fact at the literal, 
page of history in order to verify these philo- 
sophic data. The whole recorded consciousness 
of the race, as exhibited in its various stages of 
ecclesiastical and political evolution, proves that 
the exact meaning of the Providential adminis- 
tration of human affairs has been to give man 
social and sesthetic form or consciousness, by 
means of a sickening experience of the endless 
disease disorder and death wrapped up in his 
physical and moral consciousness : /. e. pertain- 
ing to him as a being disunited with God and 



of our Natural Redemption. 1 53 

his fellows by the intervention of Church and 
State, or priesthoods and governments; and who 
is to be united consequently only by the disap- 
pearance of those institutions. In other words 
the whole record of God's dealing with the race, 
shows Him to have aimed first at gradually dis- 
enchanting man of all pretensions to a religious 
righteousness, and then at gradually disabusing 
him of all confidence in his political stability : 
so ripening him for the hearty recognition of 
those exclusively Divine laws of order which 
inhere in his social constitution, and are illus- 
trated in every form of spontaneous or produc- 
tive action. 

The moral experience of the race necessarily 
involves this double or divided historic move- 
ment which we name Church and State ; the 
former a descending or centrifugal movement 
by means of which the creature becomes self- 
convinced of his essential antagonism, as natu- 
rally constituted, to the Divine perfection : the 
latter an ascending or centripetal movement, by 
means of which the creature acknowledges him- 
self as such recognized antagonist of the Divine 
perfection, to be rightfully under law to his fel- 
low-man. In other words our moral conscious- 
ness as negatively reflecting our social destiny, 
is made up of two opposing elements, self and 
the brother. But inasmuch as the virus of their 
oppugnancy inheres only in the former or active 
element, /. e. in the selfishness of the human 
heart, so the Church as representing this element 
is bound to serve the State, or assume a second- 



154 Church and State are mere 

ary place with respect to it. The sole office of 
the church is to inspire its votary with a convic- 
tion of sin, or to lead him inwardly to humble 
himself before God. In this way she prepares 
him for good citizenship, or disposes him to 
such a tender recognition of his neighbor's 
equality with himself in all inward regards, as 
shall practically beget the strictest outward fel- 
lowship. The play of these two forces fills the 
page of human history, until they succeed at 
last in generating a third or grandly unitary 
force which we call society, in which they 
both willingly coalesce and disappear, and which 
consequently thenceforth assumes the undivided 
responsibility of human destiny. 

Let us understand then that the destiny of 
man in Nature is to be made social out of 
moral ; to attain to a conscience of perfect 
social unity and order, through a previous con- 
science of complete moral discord and disorder. 
In a word our universally admitted spiritual or 
individual regeneration, has always been but a 
Providential stepping-stone and type of our 
universally ignored natural or common recrea- 
tion ; and what above all things is now incum- 
bent on us, is, to reanimate this drooping but 
Divine truth of human regeneration, by lifting 
it out of its almost wholly lapsed and lifeless — 
because merely ritual — private acceptation, 
and giving it a grander public application, 
an application to the race rather than the in- 
dividual. 

Undoubtedly the race attains to its majority 



Factors of a perfect Society. 155 

or new-birth, more slowly than the individual ; 
but not the less surely. The time will cer- 
tainly come (and I should say from existing 
signs, very soon come) when the public con- 
science will confess and put away evil with 
as much alacrity as has hitherto been illus- 
trated by the private conscience. Then society 
will see what only an individual mind here 
and there has hitherto seen, that our sense of 
infirmity or sin is never a token of the Di- 
vine displeasure to us, but only of His ten- 
derest inward delight in us : thus that we have 
walked the weary road we have walked, and 
suffered the bitter things we have suffered, not 
because God hated or condemned us, or had 
even the faintest shadow of a quarrel with 
us, but solely because He loved us with un- 
speakable love, and wooed us in that unsus- 
pected way out of the death we have in our- 
selves to the embrace of His own incorruptible 
life. 



CHAPTER IX. 

It is of course inevitable that what I have 
been saying should prove very unpalatable to 
our existing pride of Moralism, fortified as it 
everywhere feels itself to be not only by the 
power and prestige of Natural Religion, but 
even by the literal or quasi countenance of 
Revelation. 1 The highest conception of life 
possible to the religious dogmatist is the moral 
conception, because our natural or unquickened 
reason, the reason still dominated by sense, has 
no discernment but of finite existence, and mo- 
rality constitutes the highest style of such exist- 
ence. Voluntary good, the good which supposes 
a previous conflict with evil and rejection of it, 

1 I freely admit that if we had ligence. And unless therefore 
nothing to guide us as to the it receive in the progress of his- 
spiritual contents of Revelation tory some commanding spiritual 
but the Jewish letter, apart from interpretation, it must confess 
the living explication of that let- itself permanently inadequate to 
ter furnished by the Christ, we its office, and harden its adherents 
should still be a long way off* in hopeless error. It is this in- 
from any just recognition of the sane idolatry of the mere body of 
Divine infinitude. The letter the Christian truth fatally blind- 
of a Divine revelation assuming ing us to its true spirit, which 
as it necessarily must the exact everywhere belittles the average 
form of the intelligence to which ecclesiastical intellect, and ex- 
it is addressed (in order not to plains the persistent grossness 
overpower it), can at best only and carnality of our ordinary re- 
reproduce and authenticate the ligious life, 
fallacious judgments of that intel- 



Tke Constitution of Morality. 157 

and therefore implies merit in the votary, is the 
highest quality of good recognizable by our sen- 
suous intelligence; as voluntary evil, which sup- 
poses an intelligent rejection of good, and therefore 
implies demerit in the votary, is the lowest qual- 
ity of evil cognizable to that intelligence. The 
possibility of morality is wholly contingent upon 
the exact balance of these opposites. In pro- 
portion as either extreme preponderates in the 
natural constitution of the subject, the freedom 
of his action will of course be impaired, and his 
morality to that extent vitiated. He may make 
thenceforth a very good dove or a very good 
serpent, but no longer a man containing in him- 
self the stupendous contrarieties of heaven and 
hell, or the exactly equal possibilities of the 
brightest spiritual day, and the murkiest most 
menacing spiritual night. 

Such being the highest conception of life 
possible to the natural understanding, it is obvi- 
ous that the infinitude which science ascribes to 
Deity is a moral infinitude, that is to say, the 
power of being at His own pleasure infinitely 
good or infinitely evil towards other beings than 
himself. Morality or autonomic power being 
the characteristic of human nature with respect 
to the brute nature, being the thing which sep- 
arates man from all lower existences, must of 
course be thought to ally him with all higher 
existences. The Divine existence consequently 
if recognized at all must be recognized in hu- 
man shape, so that practically the infinite creator 
is always humbled to the lineaments of the in- 



158 The Letter of Religion inversely 

firm finite creature. In place of man made in 
God's image, as the truth will eventually be, we 
first see God everywhere made in the image of 
man. Hence all the early mythologies portray 
Deity as an unmixed abomination to the spirit- 
ual sense, having any amount of purely moral 
power, that is, of ability and inclination to asso- 
ciate Himself with some persons and to avert 
Himself from others, and delighting to exercise 
it in all manner of benefit to those that please 
Him, and all manner of detriment to those who 
displease Him. The infinite name of God is 
thus filled out with finite substance, until it re- 
flects at last all the littleness and depravity of 
the lowest natural mind. 

The letter of the Jewish ritual supplies the 
culminating type in this order of ideas. Here 
we have the great and beneficent creator of all 
men narrowed down to the paternity of one 
family, and that one of the meanest known to 
human kind ; associated with the destiny of one 
man, himself a homeless vagabond upon the face 
of the earth : and promising all other men pros- 
perity or menacing them with calamity as they 
should stand voluntarily related to these. You 
would think in restricting your eye to the letter 
of the Jewish scriptures, or estimating them 
apart from the luminous spiritual explication and 
commentary they met in the life death and res- 
urrection of Jesus Christ, that God was most 
strictly a moral existence, a being like ourselves 
of pure will, capable on occasion of the most 
revolting favoritism, and then of an oppression 



Serviceable to its Spirit. 159 

so tyrannical and remorseless as to put our pigmy- 
iniquities quite out of countenance. 

But the Jewish scriptures fortunately are ut- 
terly unintelligible apart from the lustrous inter- 
pretation they receive at the hands of Christianity, 
which leaves it clear as the sun in heaven that 
the Divine love has never contemplated anything 
short of an unmixed blessing to the entire race 
of man, has never designed anything short of a 
renovation of our very nature itself. Christ and 
his apostles deny that the Divine promise is ever 
of any private application, of any personal sig- 
nificance. They affirm that all the promises and 
prophecies of the Bible have exclusive reference 
not to any progeny of Abraham, nor even of 
Adam, but to an entirely new seed, a new spirit- 
ual creation of man, which should obliterate 
every vestige of the old carnality, and fill the 
natural mind with the glory of God as the 
waters fill the sea. No doubt this strain of doc- 
trine was so hostile to the obvious face of the 
old Testament letter, that the carnal Jew in the 
exact measure of his devotion to that letter, was 
bound to reckon Christ a blasphemer. The 
eternal justification of Jesus however lies in this, 
that the letter of a Divine revelation is of neces- 
sity and always an inverse and not a direct meas- 
ure of its spiritual contents. Revelation always 
implies a descent of Divine truth, a coming down 
on its part to a lower plane of intelligence than 
is primarily its due, in short a humiliation or 
obscuration of its legitimate splendor, in order 
not to harm the dim and feeble intelligence 



160 Revelation always implies 

which still aspires to know it. Every revelation 
of God to man capable of winning his assent, 
must take place within the intelligible limits of 
his own nature. The validity of the revelation 
is rigidly contingent upon its familiar adapta- 
tion to the intelligence it would enlighten : and 
what possibility was there in the infancy of hu- 
man development, that any son not merely of 
Abram, but of Adam, should have caught a spir- 
itual glimpse of God, or have failed to regard 
Him as the mere unlimited expansion of every 
distinctively human virtue, and of every distinct- 
ively human infirmity ? Besides it is upon this 
very capacity of the Divine mercy to abase itself 
to the level of the coarsest carnal concupiscence 
in the creature, that the latter's subsequent spir- 
itual resuscitation in the Divine image, his end- 
less interior sympathy and conjunction with all 
Divine perfection, exclusively pivots. For it is 
only by perfectly appeasing our natural desires, 
by richly and even exuberantly satisfying every 
legitimate appetite and passion of our nature, 
that the Divine love succeeds at last in spiritually 
extricating us from its bondage, and so conjoin- 
ing us in eternal fellowship with Himself. Thus 
the integrity of the Jewish scriptures as an au- 
thentic revelation of the Divine name, hinges to 
my apprehension upon their so faithfully associat- 
ing that name with the destiny of a person so 
obscure and worthless in all conventional estima- 
tion as Abram ; with the interests of a people 
so every way selfish and contemptible as that 
which descended from his loins. The salient 



a Felling of Spiritual Truth. 161 

peculiarity of the Jewish revelation is, that it 
gathers in the Divine love from its wonted asso- 
ciation with the gorgeous and flaunting dynas- 
ties of the earth, with the recognized and estab- 
lished powers of the world, and identifies it with 
an unknown powerless and unenlightened indi- 
vidual man, in an insignificant corner of space, 
without family descent, without followers, with- 
out wealth, without anything that attracts the 
servile adherence of men, pledging itself to turn 
all his solitude into populous plenty, and make 
his barrenness blossom as the rose. Beginning 
thus in a man of little form or comeliness, the 
Revelation ends in one of less : in a man of so 
little conventional respectability indeed as led 
vulgar observers high and low to esteem him 
most righteously smitten of God and afflicted ; 
of so few visible resources as to have been born 
in a stable, and to have been destitute all his 
days both of a place to lay his head, and of bread 
to sustain his life ; with so slender a regard 
moreover for the established proprieties of his 
time and country, as cheerfully to permit the 
grateful and familiar intercourse of the outcast 
and degraded, while he never came in contact 
with the most conspicuous piety of his nation, 
but to rebuke its unconscious hypocrisy, and lay 
bare its hidden cruelty, declaring that it was 
then especially the arch instrument of Satan, 
when it most believed itself doing the will of 
heaven. 

In no other way as I conceive could the un- 
suspected infinitude of the Divine Love so ade- 



162 The Divine Mercy primarily akin 

quately reveal itself as in thus passing by all 
that the stupid natural heart instinctively wor- 
ships under the established forms of learning 
decorum eloquence piety talent wealth empire 
or other fetish, to connect itself with the lowest 
and most despised things in man, that so its true 
character might be seen : not as a mere moral 
force approving and widening the existing dif- 
ferences among its creatures, but as a distinct- 
ively spiritual force flashing forth the inmost 
and essential unity of those creatures so vividly 
as not merely to flood every contrasted moun- 
tain-top and valley of moral inequality among 
men with the light of an inextinguishable Di- 
vine contempt and oblivion, but also to convert 
morality itself, the total moral power of man, 
into the puniest type and shadow — into the 
most carnal matrix or earthly mould — of the 
perfected Divine righteousness which is ulti- 
mately to illustrate his nature. Every word of 
Christ's mouth, every act of his life, were meant 
to show that the pride of morality in man is 
wholly illusory: that any distinction among men 
of good and evil as determined by the letter of 
the Divine law, is and must always be destitute 
of spiritual sanction, inasmuch as all men be- 
ing alike dependent upon God for all they are, 
have no just title spiritually to exalt themselves 
one above another: in short that God definitive- 
ly declines treating with conventionally right- 
eous people, or the respectabilities of the earth, 
on any other terms than their unconditional spir- 
itual humiliation : which means their freely con- 



to Man's least reputable Interests. 163 

fessing themselves sinners in virtue of that very 
righteousness or respectability, and their conse- 
quent renunciation of all boasting over their less 
fortunate fellow-men. 

It is not by any means however the apparent 
dishonor I do to morality, in thus subordinating 
it to the exigencies of our social destiny, which 
chiefly outrages the prejudices of the unthink- 
ing : it is the far deeper dishonor I seem to do 
religion in subjecting it to the same command- 
ing necessity. For the religious man is popularly 
conceived to be the end of creation ; is thought 
to be immediately or in his own proper person 
acceptable to God ; and a manifest wrong ac- 
cordingly is done to his conventional primacy, 
when he is made a mere transition to some supe- 
rior style of manhood. None of our natural 
prejudices is more intolerant, none yields more 
slowly to the modification of history, than this, 
namely : that God is at bottom a being of infi- 
nite self-love, of infinite susceptibility to affront 
and outrage, and therefore infinite in his exac- 
tions of personal devotion from His creatures : 
so that religion, being the expression of such 
personal devotion, is everywhere taken to be the 
highest form of good He recognizes in His 
creature ; an absolute good indeed, subservient 
to nothing else, and claiming of right the unlim- 
ited subservience of everything else to itself. I 
must at once dispose myself to wrestle with this 
burly prejudice till I overthrow it, or else expose 
the great truth I advocate to obloquy. If I 
shall have to traverse considerable ground in 



164 Hostility of the Religious Conscience 

doing this, I hope my reader will see the neces- 
sity more than justified in the sequel. 

Before entering however on a new chapter, 
let me anticipate an objection of my reader, 
who may allege that I have given an unfair 
statement of the religious postulate, inasmuch 
as the religious votary does not avowedly wor- 
ship God as a being of infinite self-love, but on 
the contrary, in words at all events, ascribes all 
manner of humane perfection to Him. This is 
true. The absolute dependent of a despotic 
will is more apt to conceal than express the real 
emotions of his heart towards that will. But I 
am talking of the practical attitude of the relig- 
ious mind towards God ; and I appeal to the 
entire religious record of the race, to every es- 
tablished ritual since time began, to show that 
while u the worshipper has drawn nigh to God 
with his lips, his heart has been far from him." 
They all alike prove that God has always been 
practically regarded by his authorised worship- 
per as a being of the pettiest personal aims, and 
of an intercourse with His creatures so purely 
commercial, that anything like spontaneous love 
and reverence towards Him is utterly out of the 
question. 

But I come nearer home, and make my ap- 
peal to the reader's own consciousness, if it be 
an orthodox one, with a triumphant certainty of 
being justified by it. For our orthodox eccle- 
siasticism proceeds upon the notion of God 
being a spirit full to repletion of self-love : so 
full in fact of exorbitant regard to Himself in 



to God's Spiritual Perfettion. 165 

all His intercourse with His creatures, that He 
is incapable of forgiving their infirmities freely 
and frankly as they themselves are capable of 
forgiving one another ; and demands instead, 
like a bloodier Shylock, that every base forfeit- 
ure of his bond be literally paid down. What 
does orthodoxy say for example of the Christian 
atonement '? What light does it make that 
great transaction to shed upon the Divine char- 
acter % 

Why, it makes the Christian atonement to 
turn altogether upon a something suffered by 
Christ to placate the Divine nature, rather than a 
something done by him to purify the human na- 
ture : so placing the obstacle to man's salvation, 
not in man's own purely constitutional infirmity 
where alone it belongs, but in the immitigable 
savagery of his creative source, in the essential 
inhumanity of God. Substitution is of course 
the enforced mechanism of the orthodox scheme, 
because otherwise the Divine love would be de- 
nied even a mercenary manifestation, even a 
moonlight radiance. For the scheme postulates 
God as a being of such essential malignity (eu- 
phemistically called holiness) as to require that 
His thirst of blood once aroused by the sin of 
His own abject and helpless creatures, should be 
slaked only in one of two ways : either 1. by 
the substantive reduction of these creatures them- 
selves to eternal misery ; or else 2. by the sub- 
stitution in their place of an exquisitely innocent 
victim, whose pangs compensating by their in- 
tensity what they lacked in volume, might lend 



166 Hhe fearful Falsification which 

such keenness of satisfaction to the Divine ap- 
petite for vengeance, as would practically amount 
to an eternal glut. 

Judged of by either alternative this scheme 
is obviously fatal to the Divine character ; re- 
duces the Divine name indeed below the level 
of the lowest diabolism. For the devil's evil 
is the evil of a finite nature merely : /. e. 
springs out of his inability to compass his own 
ends of life, which are the loves of self and 
of the world, without damage to the interests 
of other people. Accordingly if you could 
only release the devil from this limitation, and 
give his aims practical infinitude, by making 
the interests of other men freely harmonic with 
his own, or what is the same thing, by ordain- 
ing a scientific society among men, you would 
perfectly and permanently deliver him from 
evil, and make him at last overtly what he has 
always been covertly the pledge and purchase 
of a true Divine order on earth. But the evil 
here orthodoxly alleged of God inheres in Him- 
self as infinitely constituted, and is therefore 
wholly irrespective of His relations to others. It 
is a vindictiveness or ferocity which is alleged to 
inhere in His proper infinitude, or to grow out 
of His relations to Himself, and is consequently 
independent of everything subsequently to arise 
in His intercourse with His creatures. Clearly 
then I have no need to go a step outside the 
objector's own consciousness, in order to prove 
ritual religion a very real though most uncon- 
scious dishonor to the Divine name : a most 



Orthodoxy makes of the Atonement. 167 

thorough though most undesigned obscuration 
of the Divine perfection. And this is literally 
what its whole history amounts to, namely : a 
spiritual denial, under the guise of a formal ac- 
knowledgment, of the creative infinitude, oper- 
ated by the still unsubdued lusts of pride and 
covetousness in the human bosom. 



CHAPTER X. 

Nothing I am persuaded can be more fa- 
tally misleading to a cultivated regard, than to 
accept the testimony of the mere religious con- 
science as of any direct worth, or as final, in re- 
spect to Divine things. Death not life is the 
inevitable guerdon of that mistake, if it be per- 
manently confirmed by the intellect ; /. e. a spir- 
itual stupor to which physical death bears only 
a feeble analogy; a dim typical significance. The 
religious consciousness of man — what we call 
Natural Religion, meaning thereby a conscience 
unenlightened by Revelation — is never a bless- 
ing but always a curse, if the votary be satisfied 
with it, if it give him intellectual repose instead 
of uneasiness. It is a blessing only in so far as 
it disturbs him or leaves him unsatisfied, by con- 
fessing like the Jewish law its own insufficiency 
to appease the need of the worshipper, and 
pointing for its fulfilment to something beyond 
itself. A bare glance at the benighted state of 
the heathen nations, among whom natural relig- 
ion has undergone no modification from Revela- 
tion, suffices to show the utterly palsying influ- 
ence which the religious instinct when left to 
itself exerts upon intellectual progress. In fact 
a large survey of the operation of the religious 



Testimony of Experience, 169 

instinct in history (the instinct which prompts a 
man to aspire after direct personal relations to 
God, relations determined by his moral qualifi- 
cations) would lead us to infer that its sole func- 
tion had been to illustrate the profound and 
otherwise unimaginable baseness of the human 
heart, or bring forth its latent pride and selfish- 
ness in forms so profuse, so wanton, so diabolic, 
as to make us at last gladly renounce the possi- 
bility of a moral righteousness, and cling instead 
solely to those laws of positive order which are 
Divinely revealed in the great truth of human 
society or fellowship. 

But we need not traverse the history of the 
race to justify this momentous conclusion. The 
appeal is direct to our own individual bosoms, 
to our own private experience. Every man 
emancipated from ecclesiastical superstition, or 
in the habit of dealing fairly with his own 
intellect, spontaneously unlearns and becomes 
ashamed of his distinctively religious activity — 
that which is motived upon the essential contin- 
gency of the Divine mercy, or implies a state 
of suspended animation in it towards the wor- 
shipper until he jog it into action by prayer or 
other pious sacrifice — because he perceives it 
to be inwardly reeking with unbelief and insult 
to the Divine name. No man whatever could 
for an instant tolerate in himself any such meri- 
torious attitude as this towards God, unless the 
moral force in him, the sentiment of a selfhood 
underived from God, had so corrupted his spir- 
itual innocence and blinded him to the truth of 



170 "The Aim of all Revelation 

things, as to give him a quasi independence of 
God, and make the tree of knowledge of good 
and evil therefore seem to bear the only fruit 
suitable to nourish and make him wise. If not 
only my seeming but my real relation to God 
be a moral or personal one, so that I am justly 
capable of occupying to His regard as well as 
my own an attitude of merit and demerit, it can 
only be because the moral force in me, or senti- 
ment of selfhood, is absolute or underived ; 
since manifestly if my selfhood were derived 
from God, it could not with propriety appropri- 
ate good and evil to itself, or hold itself amena- 
ble to His praise and blame. But any such 
insane pretension as this is effectually refuted by 
the whole tenor of history, by the whole march 
of the Divine Providence on earth, which shows 
the merely physical and moral consciousness of 
man to be rapidly and inevitably merging in his 
social and aesthetic consciousness. 

The error is still more luminously, although 
more compendiously, refuted to the religious 
mind on the face of Revelation itself, every 
feature of which goes to avouch the pride of 
morality or selfhood in man as the sole enemy 
of God's righteousness on earth. The aim of 
all true religion, of all Divine revelation, from 
the beginning of time, has been to abase the 
pride of the human heart, by prostrating all 
those futile distinctions which men laboriously 
erect and cherish among themselves, and reduc- 
ing them to the same dead level of unmixed 
dependence on the sheer Divine mercy. Every 



to undermine human Virtue. 171 

great primitive creed of the earth is imbued 
with this spirit, however feebly they who name 
themselves after these creeds reflect it. The 
swarming sects which have sprouted from these 
great primitive roots, have lost all savor of their 
spiritual beginnings, and are no more to be con- 
founded with the parent substance in any case, 
than so many mites are to be confounded with 
the wholesome original cheese out of whose dis- 
solute carcass they spring. Sectarian testimony 
is very nearly worthless in so serious an inquest as 
this, because sectarianism is always a mere reac- 
tion against some established intellectual tyranny, 
and has at best some transient ecclesiastical or 
political emancipation in view. No intelligent 
student of history would accept as a priori prob- 
able a Jew's estimate of the spirit of Moses, a 
churchman's estimate of the spirit of Christ, a 
Buddhist's estimate of the spirit of Buddha, sim- 
ply because the original spirit of these majestic 
dispensations has been completely obscured in the 
bosom of their disciples under a frivolous Phari- 
saic zeal for the interests of the letter : so that 
whatsoever was grandly human and generous in 
the primitive dogma becomes in the commen- 
tary personal and mean. History however teaches 
us that the aim of all authentic Revelation has 
been to destroy human pride and covetousness 
by denying human virtue, that purely finite vir- 
tue which springs out of the conflict of good 
and evil in human nature, and is the source of 
all our spiritual arrogance rapacity and unclean- 
ness. 



172 Redemption the Secret of Creation. 

At all events, and this is what we are chiefly 
concerned with, Christianity clearly inherited 
this beneficent mission from Judaism, and at 
once proceeded to reassert it with so sincere an 
emphasis, as easily to insure the new faith the 
shaping of all subsequent human history. The 
Mosaic revelation was based upon certain tradi- 
tions which had been handed down from the 
earliest ages, in which the great laws of man's 
interior or spiritual evolution are shadowed forth 
under the forms of a literal creation, fall, and 
redemption, with a mingled fulness and concise- 
ness unparalleled in symbolic literature. But it 
proceeded to erect upon this traditional basis a 
doctrine of incomparable philosophic signifi- 
cance, in which the universal relation of man to 
God is prefigured with an exactness level to a 
child's understanding. The scope of the Mosaic 
institutions was that Jehovah, or the self-exist- 
ent, who revealed Himself under that title to the 
fathers of the Jewish people, avouched Himself 
the true God only by giving His people deliv- 
erance from oppression ; only by redeeming 
them from bondage. In other words the direct 
force of the Mosaic teaching was, that redemp- 
tion is the measure of creation : in which case, 
if the Jewish God create the race, it necessarily 
follows, dropping out the shadow and taking up 
the substance, that God spiritually creates us all 
only in so far as He first gives us redemption 
from the evils incident to our natural destitution. 
Here for the first time in history the great truth 
of the Incarnation peeps forth, and peeps forth 



The Conscience of Sin. 173 

moreover in the very largest guise, under great 
national characters capable of being read after 
a myriad of years' interval. It only needed ac- 
cordingly the illumination of Christ's humane 
temper, to give this Jewish letter the broadest 
spiritual ratification, by showing that the deliv- 
erance God accomplishes for us is out of no 
Gentile bondage but out of every evil most 
strictly incident to human nature itself, the na- 
ture of Jew as well as Roman. In short all 
Christ's teaching implies that the only redemp- 
tion to which God is privy in our behalfj is a 
spiritual redemption, a redemption from our very 
nature itself, which conscience when fairly en- 
lightened by the Divine law declares to be full 
of evil : so that a conscience of sin in the votary 
became thenceforth the unmistakable badge and 
evidence of God's spiritual presence and opera- 
tion in his bosom. 

This conscience of sin, in fact, which is the 
immemorial flower of all honest religious expe- 
rience, the rich ripe fruit of all devout discipline 
and culture, will well repay a little study at our 
hands. How does the reader account for the 
fact that the deepest and truest religious life of 
the race should bear no other blossom than this 
conscience of sin ? Can it be accounted for on 
the popular hypothesis that religion furnishes a 
direct tie between God and his worshipper ? Is 
it not far better accounted for on the hypothesis 
that it furnishes only a negative or inverse tie 
between them ; that it acts at best as a hyphen 
uniting them indeed but only by previously dis- 






174 & * s the only true Fruit 

joining them ? If my ritual devotion be a 
thing in itself acceptable to God, I cannot see 
why it should incessantly bear such bitter fruit. 
If the end of my religious culture has been only 
to convince me ever more and more deeply of 
sin towards God : if the most zealous watchful- 
ness exerted not only over my words and deeds 
but over my secret thoughts and affections : if 
prayer pertinaciously pursued in the privacy of 
my own closet year in and year out, the prayer 
of a despairing soul in hell famished for one 
drop of the water of Divine forgiveness, for one 
fragrant breath of God's peace and righteous- 
ness : if the profusest almsgiving and the most 
servile conformity to the narrowest obligations 
of religious convention : if all these things I 
say only suffice to deepen and render more 
desperate this damnable conviction of my in- 
dividual rottenness, of my personal alienation 
or remoteness from God : then clearly it seems 
to me that one of two conclusions is irresisti- 
ble; either 1. that I have been all this while 
on a wholly absurd and perverse tack in my ap- 
proaches to God i or else 2. that God is a being 
of such essential obduracy or inhumanity, as 
practically to ignore the usual motives of our 
purest and least selfish action, and take delight 
in the frenzied sighs and tears of His own off- 
spring. 

But here again some one will object saying 
"No! no! you mistake the case. The con- 
science of sin as postulated by religion in every 
true subject, is not final, is not demanded for its 



of Religious Culture. 175 

own sake, but in order strictly to give the sub- 
ject hope towards God, that is, as a preliminary 
condition of the Divine favor." 

I understand the objection fully. Let me 
make sure that the objector himself understand 
it equally well. 

Does the objector mean to say then, when he 
alleges my conviction of sin as a preliminary 
condition of the Divine favor, that the Divine 
favor towards me is moved or motived by that 
conviction upon my part % Does he mean to 
say that the Divine complacency in me is actu- 
ally prompted by my becoming convinced of 
sin towards Him? Yes? Then let me ask 
another question. Is the conviction of sin 
which I feel a real conviction ; or is it a mere 
dramatic one conceived in the interests of God's 
subsequent mercy % Is it a great and terrible 
reality, accurately reflecting the truth of things 
as far as it goes ? Or is it a mere exaction of 
the religious drama, a simulated or artificial state 
of feeling enforced upon the dramatis persona 
with a view solely to increase the eclat of the 
catastrophe ? 

If the objector affirm the former alternative, 
he at once denies what he calls the Divine holi- 
ness, meaning thereby God's abhorrence of sin. 
I could easily conceive — supposing God to 
have the personal abhorrence of sin which the 
objector attributes to Him — how He might 
show mercy to one who was really an evil-doer, 
but yet had no self-condemnation therefor : be- 
cause He would forfeit no prestige in such a 



176 Is the Conscience of Sin 

man's eyes by heaping him up with kindness. 
But so long as I not only am a sinner, but have 
the deepest conviction of the fact, feeling myself 
put thereby to an endless distance from God, 
God's holiness it appears to me becomes above 
all things bound to respect my convictions, and 
do nothing to impair or deface them, under pen- 
alty of forever forfeiting my regard. Whatever 
He might do towards one who was actually ig- 
norant of the relation between them, my intense 
knowledge of that relation forbids His drawing 
nigh to me in mercy, without shocking my be- 
lief in Him beyond all recovery. Does not the 
objector see how childish a contradiction he is 
guilty of, when he thus insists upon God's per- 
sonal hatred of sin, and yet paints Him blessing 
the sinner most amply at the very moment when 
the latter's conviction of un worthiness to be 
blessed is most intense and truthful? Absurdity 
can go no further, attains in fact its sabbath, in 
thus making God deliberately violate those laws 
of rationality which constitute His fundamental 
abode in us. 

If on the other hand the objector affirm the 
latter alternative, and say that our conviction 
of sin bears no relation to the actual truth of 
things, but is demanded simply by the exigencies 
of the Divine mercy which otherwise could get 
no purchase u^on our regard ; that it grows out 
of a mere transient hiding of His face on God's 
part from the soul He is going to bless, with no 
touch of reality about it, being in fact a mere 
arbitrary and enforced reduction of the soul to 






Real or Dramatic? 177 

despair, with a view to enhance the lustre of 
God's approaching mercy : then clearly the ob- 
jector sinks religion to the level of a vulgar 
nursery farce, and degrades the adorable Name 
to a traffic in deceptions so paltry, to a habit of 
egotism so refined and remorseless, that any 
half-breed savage might be expected to shy at 
them. 

And yet this is the precise practical attitude 
of the church upon all this question. She does 
in words affirm the Christian redemption of 
human nature, but she makes this redemption 
perfectly inoperative towards the sinner, save in 
so far as he becomes qualified for it by some 
underhand dealing of the Divine spirit with 
him, issuing in this conviction of sin. It is not 
the sinner qua a sinner who ever experiences the 
Divine clemency ; but only the sinner who is 
favorably differenced from other sinners by some 
sly dishonest operation of the Divine spirit in his 
bosom disposing him to appreciate and solicit it. 
The whole truth of Christ's redemption is thus 
turned into a stupendous sham, and God's stain- 
less mercy which has no respect but to the need 
of His creatures, and above all their unfelt need, 
is converted into a paltry self-seeking, into a 
contemptible solicitude for His own aggrandize- 
ment. We occasionally indict our mock-auc- 
tions as nuisances, because they swindle the 
public into the purchase of stuffed watches. 
But our bogus theologians who systematically 
convert the fine gold of the gospel into glitter- 
ing tinsel, and sell it for lucre, occupy the high- 



178 The Sectarian View intolerable. 

est seats in our synagogues, receive the pro- 
foundest greetings in our market places, and 
are devoutly called of men Rabbi ! Rabbi ! 

I deny this pinchbeck evangel in toto. It is 
an outrage and an insult to all goodness and 
truth. So far as it becomes a working-principle 
in us, a principle of life or action, it turns us 
intellectually into idiots, and paralyzes every 
generous throb of our bosoms. And surely 
that cannot be a Divine truth whose legitimate 
tendency is to soften the brain and harden the 
heart. Creation is not a Divine make-believe, 
nor is God the supreme charlatan that so 
many devout respectable men conceive Him to 
be. Our conviction of sin is not a pure com- 
edy enacted by the invisible spirit of God in 
our bosoms, and intended to set off His subse- 
quent great mercy; nor is redemption in general 
that exquisitely shallow and unveracious per- 
formance which our best-accredited theologians 
delight to make it appear. On the contrary it 
is at once the profoundest and the sublimest of 
truths; the profoundest, because it calls into 
vigorous play every emotion, every affection, 
every passion of the heart, clothing it indeed 
with new and expansive powers to all eternity ; 
and the sublimest, because it is the most fertile 
also in intellectual consequences, putting the 
mind indeed upon a career of endless develop- 
ment. I hope I shall be able in the sequel to 
justify my convictions in this regard to my read- 
er's intelligence. In the mean time let us pursue 
the topic we are on a little further, in order to 



The Judgment a Spiritual one. 179 

ascertain if we can the philosophic contents of 
what we call " a conscience of sin." 

One of the first things that strikes the mind 
in investigating the origin of the mental judg- 
ment which we denominate "a conscience of 
sin," is that though the judgment be moral in 
its beginnings (or take its rise in a lively percep- 
tion of some wrong actually done) it soon loses 
that quality and becomes altogether spiritual. 
In other words, it is matter of daily observation 
that a genuine conscience of sin, or sense of 
self-condemnation, is out of all ratio to the 
amount of evil actually done, much more act- 
ually doing. In other words still, we all know 
very well that they who habitually do the least 
evil have the tenderest consciences, they who do 
the most the bluntest consciences. 

Now this fact is inexplicable upon any other 
hypothesis than that the sense of sin is at bottom 
only a tough earthly rudiment and root of spir- 
itual reverence or humility ; an instinctive cor- 
dial pre-sentiment, rather than a developed intel- 
lectual sentiment, of the awful disproportion 
which exists between the all-good and His de- 
pendent offspring. It is a crude unhandsome 
germ, a coarse earthly mould or matrix, of that 
genial modesty or inmost grace of innocence 
which is the soul of true manhood, and keeps 
the eternal heavens themselves fresh and sweet. 
Hence alone it is that as we have just seen, the 
subject of this conviction is more than all others 
averse to evil-doing, and feels the soil of an evil 
thought, provided it be a really and not a mere 



I So The Philosophic Contents 

conventionally evil one, more poignantly than 
others do the grossest contact of literal defile- 
ment. In fact one's true conviction of sin is so 
clearly a mark of interior quickening, of ad- 
vanced and advancing spiritual growth, that it 
is always sure to be begotten at its maturity of 
a hearty disgust of one's religious righteousness, 
instead of remorse for admitted evil. No one 
has begun to feel a spiritual conviction of sin, 
who does not perceive himself much more ab- 
horrent to God by his virtues than his vices, by 
his piety than his profligacy : so that we may 
safely describe the sinner as one, who having 
laboriously tried to endue himself in all manner 
of legal or popularly accredited righteousness, 
finds it a garment infinitely scant of his soul's 
demands ; finds it a garment indeed, like the 
fig leaves in Eden, much better adapted to ex- 
pose his spiritual shanks than to conceal them. 

Let us clearly make up our minds then at the 
outset, that a very great distinction obtains be- 
tween the conscience of criminality and the con- 
science of sin, between the mere doing of evil 
and the feeling oneself to be evil. To do evil is 
one thing, the lowest thing a man can do; to 
feel oneself a sinner is a totally opposite thing, 
is indeed the height of a man's spiritual achieve- 
ment, for this world at all events. To do evil 
is the heritage of every man of woman born. 
To feel a conscience of sin belongs only to 
those who are also spiritually born, born from 
above : that is to say, belongs only to those in 
whom a nascent sympathy with all Divine good- 



of a Conscience of Sin. 181 

ness is being interiorly and invisibly wrought. 
We all of us do evil by virtue of our Adamic 
generation ; no one unaffectedly feels himself to 
be evil, but by virtue of a regeneration to which 
the Adamic or carnal principle is being Divinely 
subjected in the unseen depths of his mind. In 
a word evil-doing belongs to the moral sphere 
of our experience : the conscience of sin to the 
spiritual sphere. Evil-doing is a prompting of 
unregenerate nature, of the mind still in bond- 
age to sense. Sin is always a judgment of the 
spiritual mind, the mind which has begun to be 
rationally disengaged from sense. The two 
things are as distinct as earth and heaven. Men 
have always done evil by the simple force of 
nature, as easily as they have drunk water. No 
one has ever really reckoned himself a sinner 
towards God but by a force altogether superior 
to nature, a Divine force which is urgent to re- 
deem him from nature and clothe him with its 
own proper immortality. So that we may say 
without any hesitation that while all of us do 
evil naturally, only those of us really charge our- 
selves with sin who have been rendered in- 
wardly averse to evil-doing : or what is the 
same thing, have been spiritually penetrated 
by the Divine perfection, and quickened in its 
image. 

Now these two most distinct things, moral 
and spiritual existence, are so assiduously con- 
founded by the traditional cant of the church, 
that no doctrine founded on their essential dis- 
crimination will be likely to receive the ready 



182 The true Confession of Sin 

assent of our intelligence. My reader must 
bear with me therefore while I seek to vindicate 
at greater length the distinction I have already 
made, and rescue its enormous evangelical uses 
from the thorough contempt to which the 
church's besotted administration of sacred things 
has consigned them. We are habitually taught 
by her inspiration even in infancy to call our- 
selves sinners with a profuseness of indifference 
amounting to a most serious travesty and profa- 
nation of Divine truth. Go into any of our 
ordinary revivalist prayer-meetings, and you 
will find even the youngest spokesman dealing 
out confessions of sin so rollicking and glib, as to 
denote a wholly unsubdued natural force within, 
and avouch themselves a mere unprincipled 
parrotry of sacred utterances. The natural lust 
of distinction craves no sweeter pasturage, no 
subtler gratification, than is found oftentimes in 
these conventionally shaded and unsuspected 
places. The love of men's approbation is such 
an inveterate sly-boots, that it will drive us to 
deck ourselves in sackcloth and ashes, if the 
fashion only set in that direction, quite as gaily 
as in purple and fine linen. 

The true confession of sin is never a verbal 
one ; much less a public one. It is what the 
contrite heart, the heart truly touched with God's 
overpowering love, whispers and only whispers, 
to the proud uplifted head, in order to humble 
it to the dust. It comes accordingly with the 
utmost difficulty to one's own interior ear, and 
cannot possibly endure to publish itself. I do 



is never a ritual one. 183 

not believe such a thing to be possible as a sin- 
cere ritual confession of sin. I do not believe 
that any Roman Catholic father-confessor ever 
listened to such a confession. They no doubt 
listen often enough to confessions of criminality ; 
but confessions of sin, never. That conviction 
can be acknowledged only to God and oneself. 
In fact the confessional does its best to defeat the 
possibility of spiritual life in the penitent, because 
it perpetually subjects the intercourse between 
God and him, which is nothing if not private, 
to its own profane interference, to its own sordid 
mercantile or mediatorial fumbling. The least 
genuine conviction of sin, or what is the same 
thing, the feeblest dawn of spiritual life, opens 
one's eyes so very wide to the truth of things 
between universal man and God, that the priest- 
ly power of binding and loosing tumbles off in- 
continently into very puerile blasphemy : and 
even those solemn hortatory and precatory dis- 
plays which take place in our Protestant sympo- 
sia, confess themselves a mere instinctive effort 
of the sesthetic faculty to realize itself under 
difficulties, and vindicate its coming uses in the 
highest spheres of thought. A spiritual glimpse 
of the uncleanness enclosed in one's ritual right- 
eousness, in one's conventional respectability, is 
by no means a festive experience, inspires no 
volubility, baffles utterly our ordinarily florid 
dramatic capabilities. It is in truth so simply 
fatal to the consecrated egotism of the heart, 
puts on so withering an aspect towards every 
devout and skulking form of selfish aspiration, 



184 One's Conscience of Sin means 

as to make the love of a humiliated harlot, and 
the prostrate guilt of a woman taken in the act 
of adultery, comparatively clean and innocent : 
infinitely more clean and innocent indeed to the 
manly bosom and therefore to the Divine bosom, 
than all the sanctimonious and obscene virtue 
that ever thrived by insulting them. 

The total philosophic worth of what we call 
a conscience of sin, consists in its being a dis- 
covery by the private soul of the absolute 
equality of all men before God, and of the 
consequent falsity of its own pretension to stand 
any better there than anybody else ; even this 
publican. Of course no man can feel this con- 
viction very pungently, who has not previously 
felt a conviction of our moral or differential 
righteousness before God, and striven as much 
as possible to array himself in it. A man may 
have long had a conviction of criminality tow- 
ards his fellow-man, may have consciously for- 
feited his fellow-man's approbation ; but this 
does not constitute a conscience of sin by any 
means. This latter is a feeling in one's bosom 
of one's unlikeness to God, the source of one's 
life ; a sickening sense of the ineffable smallness 
filthiness and self-seeking of all sorts that are 
wrapped up in one's best conventional virtue; 
and hence it is an utter destruction of one's nat- 
ural pride in oneself. The mere criminal has 
no such feeling as this. Indeed the man who 
most abounds in actual injustice to his fellow- 
man, is the fullest of pride in himself, and the 
least cognizant of his total unlikeness to God. 



his worship of God's Perfection. 185 

He is in fact a God to himself, and cheerfully 
dispenses with any other. The life of nature, 
the mere animal life, is wholly unsubdued in 
such a man, while in every one of the least 
spiritual enlargement it has begun to take a 
wholly secondary place, has begun in fact to be 
very painfully depressed. This depressing in- 
fluence which the conscience of sin exerts upon 
the natural life of its subject, is logically inev- 
itable to the experience, because the experience 
he is actually undergoing, and which is masked 
by the conscience of sin, is that of a most real 
interior divorce from nature, and a profound 
spiritual acknowledgment of his exclusively Di- 
vine parentage. In other words it is only a liv- 
ing illustration of nature's habitually inverse or 
topsy-turvy way of reflecting spiritual truth. 
Nature is the realm of the finite, and is there- 
fore of course and always the exact inversion 
of the infinite. Where the one says life, the 
other must necessarily say death. Where the 
one says light, the other must needs say dark- 
ness. Consequently when a man feels his inmost 
heart melting by the Divine compassion, and 
the foretaste of a mercy so tender as to withhold 
nothing from him, his native sense of merit in- 
stantly withers away, confesses itself the direst 
spiritual blasphemy, and leaves him no choice 
but to cry, God ! be merciful to me a sinner ! 
his base natural organs being incompetent to 
attest the blissful interior access of life in any 
positive worthy way, but only in that rude neg- 
ative or inverse way. 



i86 7/ practically declares God's 

Thus a conviction of sin is nature's inevita- 
ble confession of imbecility in presence of the 
Highest. To the angelic apprehension natural 
death signifies resurrection to life, because the 
angel sees the inner side of the phenomenon, 
we who are still in the flesh the outer side. 
When therefore a man calls himself a sinner, 
and most feels himself to be one, we are to look 
upon those expressions and that experience as 
brute nature's uncouth and obtuse homage to 
the Lord's presence in our nature ; by no means 
as a direct or worthy manifestation of the great 
spiritual truth itself. When a woman is in trav- 
ail she has sorrow : but when her travail is over, 
she rejoices that a man is born into the world. So 
precisely if we were once out of nature, we 
should doubtless speak a worthier speech. But 
so long as we have only natural organs, we must 
needs report every inner accession of life we ex- 
perience in these broken accents of natural de- 
spair and death: or else be wholly misunderstood. 
No one in such a case has the least intention to 
intimate that God feels towards him the same 
condemnation he feels towards himself. He 
knows the contrary. He knows in all his 
bones that God feels infinitely more tenderness 
towards him than He feels towards Himself; 
and can by no possibility feel otherwise to all 
eternity. And it is precisely when he would 
express his panting conviction of this magna- 
nimity, that all he already knows of life shriv- 
els incontinently into death, and all he pos- 
sesses of strength converts itself spontaneously 



Goodness to be beyond Expression. 187 

into corruption, by way of setting forth the in- 
effable splendor of the truth. 

This is the short and sufficient reason why all 
they who are truly right-minded or reconciled 
to the Divine name, feel a sleepless conscience 
of sin; while they who are otherwise minded, 
being spiritually as full of self-righteousness as 
an Qgg is full of meat, enjoy a really undisturbed 
conscience towards God and their neighbor, and 
fill the foolish resounding earth with the equally 
fatiguing din of their piety and their pence. 



CHAPTER XL 

As we have already seen, the conscience of 
sin, though it bear a purely spiritual flower, yet 
owns a moral root. That is to say, it always 
originates in a judgment which the soul passes 
upon itself for having actually done wrong. 
But the precise mischief which I lay to the 
charge of the technical church is, that she for- 
ever prevents this spiritual efflorescence in the 
conscience of her votaries, by persistently inten- 
sifying their moral consciousness, or making 
what is purely phenomenal and transitory in 
experience, dominate what alone is Divinely 
real and permanent. Her deepest instincts of 
self-preservation bind her to this course ; bind 
her to perpetuate the prevalence of the flesh 
over the spirit ; bind her to suppress as much as 
possible our spiritual development, by exacer- 
bating to the utmost our moral consciousness. 
Why should this be so? 

Let me repeat the question. The question 
is, why should the technical church be so much 
more alert to inflame the sentiment of a moral 
or differential righteousness among men, contin- 
gent upon a man's phenomenally free activity, 
than that of a spiritual or universal righteous- 
ness, contingent upon God's pure mercy ? 



The Church affeSs a real Sancfity. 189 

The answer is not far to seek. For the spirit- 
ual man. the man who is not merely convicted 
by the letter of the law of doing evil, but much 
more deeply convinced by its spirit of being 
evil, at once confesses himself hopeless; gives 
himself up to a sheer dependence upon the un- 
bought Divine mercy: renounces in other words 
all reliance upon any righteousness short of that 
Divine and infinite one which has been operated 
in his very nature, and which is alone attested 
by the Christian truth; and laughs a laugh con- 
sequently of the frankest scorn at the church's 
pretension to do anything more than typify such 
a righteousness; laughs a laugh in fact ot bound- 
less scorn at the pretension of all the petty priest- 
hoods and all the petty sabbaths and all the 
petty sacraments and all the petty sanctities ot 
whatever sort since time began and until time 
shall end. to do anything more than most faintly 
typify such a righteousness. 

Now the church claims a real sanctity, not a 
typical one ; claims to be itself a Divine finality 
and not a mere means to an end : and it she 
did not she would be obliged to fall behind the 
world in place of taking precedence of it. For 
the world is a Divine reality in its way, and 
would be excessively slow to postpone itself to 
anything not at the very least as real. At all 
events it would very properly hold a church 
which should admit itself to be of a purely 
figurative efficacy at an extremely low figure. 
There is accordingly nothing which the church 
so instinctively resents as this imputation ot a 



190 The Church lives by flattering 

mere representative worth, of a purely symbolic 
sanctity, which yet is all that the spiritual mind 
accords it. And you easily perceive therefore 
that she spontaneously covets no such recogni- 
tion, engenders of her own good-will no such 
offspring. If ever she opens a door to them, 
you may be sure it's never her front door to 
admit them, but only her back door to let them 
out. She of course does her best and most 
amiable to stifle them by assimilation before she 
expels them ; but finding this impracticable, 
she contents herself with heralding them as in- 
fidel and reprobate to the mercenary scent of 
the mongrel gentlemen, half-secular half-religious, 
who hang upon her skirts, and do her dirty 
work, whether of public laudation or of public 
defamation, at the annual tariff of two dollars 
fifty cents to lay subscribers, with a liberal dis- 
count to the clergy. 

It is thus only the moral man whom the 
church cares to deal with; the man in whom 
the intensest spiritual destitution is concealed 
under the rankest moral plenty; the man who 
estimating himself solely by the letter or sem- 
blance of righteousness is as yet wholly un- 
taught and unchastened of its spirit or sub- 
stance. This man is still alive, is still unslain 
in all his native arrogance, and covets nothing 
so much as the outward or public consecration 
of it. And this the church yields him in the 
frankest and fullest measure, in exchange for his 
voluntary submission to her. He rejoices in the 
church consequently, and she rejoices even more 



our self-righteous Instinfts. 191 

in him. For while she fully authenticates the 
inmost pride of his heart and gives it a Divine 
exequatur, his adhesion alone confers upon her 
that precise fig-leaf of justification which she 
needs to shield her nakedness from carnal eyes, 
and to permit her still to claim the unchallenged 
primacy of the world. The pretension of the 
church either to the reverence or the revenues 
of the world would be preposterous even to her 
own eyes, if it were not backed by at least some 
semblance of use. And the semblance of use 
which the church enacts is that of sanctifying, 
or separating to God, the worldling who publicly 
professes religion, or publicly confesses his sins. 
The churchman, or sanctified worldling, differs 
from the still unsanctified one in absolutely no 
other respect than this, that the one makes a 
public profession of religion, which is a public 
confession of sin : the other does not. In all 
private respects they are so perfectly one, that 
the church is never weary of exhorting and per- 
suading the still unsanctified worldling to come 
and be sanctified. 

We may say then that the direct and inevita- 
ble, though most undesigned and unconscious, 
influence of the church has been to drug the 
world's conscience, or debauch its spiritual fac- 
ulties, by administering to it this adroit opiate 
of a Divine ratification of all that the human 
heart infolds of the subtlest selfishness and lust. 
For of course the man who at her instance pub- 
licly confesses his sins, would be the last of men 
to do so, if she were going to condemn him 



192 Moral Righteousness fatal 

therefor, if she were going to give him there- 
upon a public reprobation and not the profusest 
public absolution. The only man who can sin- 
cerely afford to have his evil-deeds condemned 
by others, is he who first condemns himself; is 
the man in whom self-love has learned to yield 
the pas to neighborly love ; in whom the subtler 
consciousness of evil-being has utterly consumed 
the grosser consciousness of evil-doing. It is 
the spiritual man in short ; the man whom a 
sincere self-contempt renders perfectly indiffer- 
ent to the contempt of other men ; the man in 
whom the growth of a genuine humility ex- 
hausts that puerile pride of morality, or self- 
hood, which is the sole source of evil-doing. 
And every such man of course, having neither 
the expectation nor the desire of personal ag- 
grandizement, is heartily indifferent alike to the 
church's benison and malison. 

Not so the moral man, the man who is still 
in the vivid green of life's spring. He burns 
with the desire of commending himself to the 
Divine regard ; craves nothing so intensely as 
God's approbation upon his personal character ; 
aspires to nothing so much as to realize every 
signal mark of God's personal favor and delight. 
In truth every such man still revels in the heyday 
and delirium of self-love ; and he would see the 
church hanged accordingly before he would ac- 
cept an honest scourging at her hands ; /. e. con- 
fess himself a sinner at the risk of provoking 
her faintest frown, at the risk of encountering 
anything indeed but her plenary justification. 



to Spiritual Innocence. 193 

This the church yields him in measure pressed 
down, heaped up, and running over, proclaim- 
ing it the sum of all righteousness, the one 
thing needful upon earth, the most acceptable 
and best requited service any man can render to 
God, to " get religion " as it is vulgarly termed ; 
i. e. publicly identify himself with the interests 
of the church, and fulfil her requirements. Ev- 
ery man accordingly in whom the natural loves 
of self and the world so overlay his spiritual 
perception of the love of God and the neigh- 
bor, as to permit him to believe that the most 
High really countenances this ecclesiastical 
trumpery, really connives at this transparent 
whitening of sepulchres and making clean the 
mere outside of the platter, to the extent of 
pledging His immutable truth to the satisfac- 
tion of such grossly personal aims, such shame- 
lessly selfish aspirations, enters her courts with 
joy : and is there very sure, unless he prove an 
exceptional person and listen betimes to the up- 
braidings of God's spirit within him, to become 
tenfold more the child of hell than he was origi- 
nally. 

Consider well what I say, for I believe it is a 1 
point of vital importance to the elucidation of / 
our existing intellectual obscurities. The church 
leaves her votaries more stupidly blind to the 
spiritual depths of life than she finds them, be- 
cause she does nothing but confirm nature's 
fundamental fallacy, which is that we stand 
primarily related to God not as a race but as 
individuals, that is to say morally, rather than 
13 



194 The Church an Embodiment 

socially; hence that all the data of our moral 
consciousness are final or absolute, excluding 
any intrinsic subserviency to ulterior and supe- 
rior social and aesthetic issues. Nature teaches 
us, and the church emphasizes the lesson with 
the whole force of her lungs, that God's true re- 
lation to us is a moral or personal one : that He 
loves us accordingly when we do well, and hates 
us when we do ill ; loves us indeed with such 
absurd unreasonable partiality, and hates us with 
such absurd unreasonable malignity, that He 
does not hesitate to bestow upon us in the for- 
mer case the eternal delights of heaven, and 
will not be bought off in the latter case from 
the gratification of an exquisite revenge, except 
by some altogether extraordinary concession to 
His self-love: so reducing the immaculate Name 
below the level of any brutal and bloody des- 
pot; reducing it in fact to something very like 
furious idiocy. 

The very gravamen of our native ignorance 
and imbecility, is, this low conception we enter- 
tain of the relation between us and God, as 
being not a wholly creative or spiritual one, but 
a strictly moral or personal one. And the church 
keeps up her dishonest prestige in the world by 
diligently fomenting these natural prejudices of 
ours against God, teaching us to look upon 
Him as an essentially outward and therefore 
finite power, sustaining the most intensely literal 
and personal relations to us, and feeling pre- 
cisely the same low emotions of moral or vol- 
untary approbation and disapprobation towards 



of our Sottishness in Divine things. 195 

us, as we feel towards ourselves and towards 
each other. For example, I am tempted when 
young and immature to tell a lie or to do some 
other evil thing, to save myself from punish- 
ment or advance myself at my brother's ex- 
pense. The evil is pronounced and palpable, 
and I secretly condemn myself for it, devoutly 
asking God's forgiveness. Now in these cir- 
cumstances what does the church, speaking by 
my parents or guardians, do for my intellect ? 
Does she afford me the least hint of anything 
involved in the transaction beyond the rupture 
of a purely personal tie between me and God, 
beyond the infraction of a merely moral obliga- 
tion ? Not a whit. She leaves the relation 
between us precisely as she finds it, that is, alto- 
gether actual and outward, so that if by prayer 
or other personal sacrifice I get rid of a whack 
at His powerful hands, I shall feel myself to 
the extent of her influence over me, absolved 
from all further damage. Our basest natural 
prepossessions of Divine things being thus au- 
thenticated by her unfaithful stewardship, our 
spiritual faculties of course remain crippled, 
dwarfed, and distorted; so that if we ever do 
cease to regard God as a mere unparalleled 
policeman intent on catching us tripping, and 
come to the discernment of Him as a tender 
father burning to endue us in His own spotless 
righteousness, it will not only be without her 
help, but in defiance of her authority, and to 
the consequent discredit of our own good name. 
What has been the consequence to the church 



196 She is the Refuge and Citadel 

herself of the spiritual fatuity she has thus re- 
duced us to ? What has she herself gained by 
thus persistently degrading the soul's relation to 
God into the relation of an evil-doer to a po- 
liceman, of a poor timorous skulking mouse to 
an all-accomplished omnipotent infallible tab- 
by? Why, she encourages every sneak of a 
fellow who has been robbing a henroost, and is 
dismally afraid of being found out, to snuggle 
unchallenged up to the very altars of God ; 
while they to whom the bare thought of evil- 
doing brings disgust, invite at best her distant 
recognition, are very fortunate indeed if they do 
not incur her decided enmity. God's true church 
on earth is incapable of proving a refuge for 
roguery; it is a refuge only for those to whom 
roguery is an impossible thing. The evil-doer 
has no part nor lot in its inheritance, but only 
the man who is inhibited from moral or actual 
defilement, by an exclusively inward or spiritual 
cleansing. Yet the technical church has so ef- 
fectually debased public sentiment on this entire 
subject, has so completely fixed our native imbe- 
cility and idiocy in Divine things, by persistently 
exalting the demands of religion above the de- 
mands of life, or what is the same thing, postpon- 
ing the claims of human society, human fellow- 
ship, human equality, human brotherhood, to her 
own claims, that what we now recognize as the 
distinctively " religious " mind has at last got to 
be out of all comparison the least spiritual mind 
of the day. Talk to a " religious " man of what 
he conceives to be the highest themes, and you 



of a frenzied Egotism and Unbelief 1 97 

will learn to your astonishment that God takes 
no interest in universal questions, that is, in those 
oeconomical, political, and social questions, which 
interest all good and wise men in proportion to 
their goodness and wisdom ; but only in some 
piddling private question of the " salvation " of 
this that and the other individual soul : such 
"salvation" apparently meaning first of all the 
deepest possible conviction on the part of its 
subject, that he is exposed to extreme personal 
danger at God's hands ; and then a secondary 
persuasion that this primary conviction has gone 
far enough to placate the Divine animosity, and 
turn it away from its injurious designs. In 
other words, the " salvation " of my soul accord- 
ing to the current pulpit orthodoxy, amounts in 
plain English and when stripped of its euphuistic 
disguises to this: 1. the utmost possible excita- 
tion of my lowest and most selfish fears towards 
God ; or the outbirth of a distrust towards Him 
in my bosom which would scandalize a Hotten- 
tot, and is able to justify itself only on the hy- 
pothesis of His essential inhumanity; and then 
2. a persuasion that these base fears themselves 
have proved a tribute so well-pleasing to God, 
as to constitute a righteous basis of discrimina- 
tion for Him between me and other men, and a 
righteous basis of hope consequently for me that 
I at least shall eventually escape His vindictive 
judgments. 

Do not misunderstand me. I have no desire 
to deny, on the contrary I am particularly de- 
lighted to affirm, that there are numberless per- 



198 "There are very many in the Church 

sons clerical and lay within the bounds of the 
technical church who are spiritually disaffected 
to her righteousness, and therefore inwardly un- 
touched by her plagues. And the church her- 
self will be very sure to point to these persons 
who are nominally affiliated to her, as furnishing 
a decisive refutation of my criticism. But the 
artifice is too transparent to deceive. I have 
been speaking of the church exclusively in her 
historic aspect, as a visible institution distinct 
from the State. I have been contemplating re- 
ligion exclusively as a separating economy, or 
in those features which give her formal discrimi- 
nation from " the world." That a very Divine 
substance underlies this form, and is working 
itself out to view by means of it, I am not 
merely eager to admit but am prepared to de- 
monstrate in due time and place. But nothing 
can be more opposed than substance and form ; 
and here we are dealing exclusively with the 
latter. In point of form then, or so far as her 
ritual righteousness is concerned, I say that the 
church authenticates the lowest principles of hu- 
man nature, and was intended so to do. No 
doubt many a man who is outwardly religious 
or embraced in the church's communion, is in- 
wardly void of a separatist (/. e. Pharisaic) 
spirit, and full of a humane one. But that this 
is in spite of his technical "religion" and not 
because of it, in defiance of his church and not 
in affiance with it, is abundantly evident from 
the circumstance that such men are always re- 
garded with more or less distrust by their eccle- 



fVho are not of the Church, 199 

siastical superiors, with a certain dread lest they 
identify themselves with some or other of the 
" unsanctified " reform movements of the world. 
And then again it must be said of certain modi- 
fications of the church form itself in this coun- 
try, the Unitarian and Universalist modifications 
especially, that at bottom they evince under the 
name of the church such a complete seculariza- 
tion of it, such a sheer though unconscious be- 
trayal of its distinctive temper, and such a Prov- 
idential moulding of it at last to the promotion 
of kindly feeling and good manners, as ought in 
all fairness to exempt them from hostile criti- 
cism. Unitarianism and Universalism call them- 
selves the church, but then it is the church in an 
altogether Pickwickian sense of the word, or 
with pretensions so affable as to offend nobody. 
They cultivate the customary sabbatical sulks, 
or try to look as decently morose on their way 
to church as the more hardened sects ; but in 
vain. You always detect a deprecatory wink 
underneath that restores them to your human 
sympathy, and turns the whole performance into 
mere unconscious mimicry, into pure devout 
comedy. Besides, on following them to church, 
did you ever hear a word from either of their 
pulpits which was not full of conciliation to all 
the world, or which the most sensitive bonhomie 
could reasonably object to ? 

Admit all this fifty times over: it does not 
disprove but only confirms what I have been 
all along saying of the religious temper in hu- 
manity when regarded in itself, and divested of 



200 The Church cannot confer both 

the modification it is daily receiving from the 
sentiment of human fellowship. Admit that 
there are many tender thoughtful suffering souls 
in " the church," who are hungering and thirst- 
ing for the true bread and true water of life, 
who are pining in other words for a living right- 
eousness, and who consequently feel, though 
they would be horrified to avow, that their 
ritual righteousness is a mockery : clearly this 
fact inures not to the church's credit, but alto- 
gether to her discredit. For if the spiritual man 
within the church becomes spiritual not by cul- 
tivating her distinctive righteousness, but by dis- 
carding it ; not by shutting up his sympathies to 
her communion, but by giving them the frankest 
expansion in every sphere of human need : then 
clearly the good conferred by the church is indi- 
rect not direct, stands less in what she gives than 
in what she withholds. In other words the dis- 
tinction which ritual religion confers upon her 
votary before God, is purely literal or formal, 
and in the nature of things therefore cannot be 
spiritual or substantial : which is precisely all 
that I myself feel concerned to say. 

The logic of the case is inexorable. If the 
church have any valid mission whatever to sanc- 
tify or set apart to God an earthly seed (and we 
shall not be able to explain the grandly leading 
part she has played in history on any feebler 
hypothesis) she must do it in one of two ways: 
that is, by giving them either a figurative or a 
real consecration ; either a formal or a substantial 
righteousness ; a purely literal or else a purely 



. a Literal and a Spiritual Sanffity. 20 1 

spiritual sanctity. She cannot do both ; because 
form and substance, letter and spirit, have noth- 
ing in common, or admit only an inverse never 
a direct congruity. They correspond of course, 
but only by inversion, never by continuity ; as 
the shell of a nut corresponds to its kernel, or a 
glove to the hand. The reciprocal integrity of 
the two factors is conditioned upon their un- 
swerving antagonism. If the letter of truth 
were ever a direct, and not in all cases an in- 
verse, expression of its spirit, the spirit would 
be swallowed up or extinguished. If the Di- 
vine life in me (which is a positive quantity 
only on its spiritual side, and therefore demands 
a purely negative observance on its literal side, 
saying, thou shalt not do this, that, or the other) 
should seek to procure itself positive external 
expression as well, how could it succeed? What 
literal act, or series of literal acts, could posi- 
tively express the love I bear my wife, my child, 
my friend, my fellow-man ? It is evident that 
my love just in proportion to its purity, disclaims 
positive attestation ; permits only a negative ex- 
pression ; /. e. an expression which consists in 
the abasement of my self-love. If any act, or 
any series of acts, were positively or adequately 
expressive of my love, they would exhaust it, 
and so turn it into aversion. For exhausted love 
always implies aversion to the object that has 
exhausted it. If by any one act I could fully 
express, L e. satisfy, the affection I bear my wife, 
my child, my friend, my neighbor, my next act 
towards them would logically be one of exter- 



202 JVhich Alternative does 

mination : since, my affection for them being ex 
hypothesi used up or exhausted, I could not pos- 
sibly feel any other sentiment towards them but 
aversion. Satisfied affection means aversion. 
Affection in proportion to its tenderness or vi- 
vacity seeks a perpetual gratification : L e. de- 
sires to be unsatisfied. The very life of it lies 
in seeking and never accomplishing. 1 

Religion is bound then to elect between these 
alternatives; is bound to choose whether she will 
be regarded as bestowing a purely carnal and 
therefore representative righteousness upon her 
children ; or a purely spiritual and therefore real 
righteousness. 

If she choose the former alternative, she of 
course abdicates her own supremacy, vacates 
whatever authority she has hitherto claimed, sur- 
renders her still undiminished theoretic primacy 
to the State, tumbles off at once in short into 
" the portion of weeds and outworn faces." 
This alternative accordingly is not to be thought 
of. 

But now if she choose the latter alternative, 
as she unquestionably must do in sheer self-pres- 
ervation, then she of necessity makes her appeal 
to that thing in her children which most alien- 
ates them from God and all Divine ways, name- 
ly, their self-love, their pride of selfhood, their 
moral force; and so perpetually fans in their 
bosoms, if she does not enkindle, hell's most 
subtle most genial and unsuspected flame. If 
my religious righteousness be a real one ; in 

1 See Appendix, Note B. 



She see Jit to choose ? 203 

other words, if the distinction of religious and 
profane among men which the church enacts 
be a valid distinction in God's sight : then un- 
questionably although worldly prudence, or the 
claims of Mammon, may forbid me overtly to 
urge the distinction, my fidelity to my own 
sincere religious convictions will commend it 
all the more warmly to my private or spirit- 
ual regard ; so that practically I shall find my- 
self cultivating whatever aspirations, desires, 
thoughts, and actions, may most justify the dis- 
tinction, or most separate me from my neigh- 
bor : which is only saying in a roundabout 
way, that I shall abandon myself to the sub- 
tlest illusions of self-love, a self-love baptized 
with God's approbation and therefore proof 
against correction. A consecrated self-love 
may burn with an inmost tyranny and rapac- 
ity, and yet feel itself hardened against re- 
buke : for who can effectively rebuke what 
God Himself has approved % If my church- 
going, my public and private devotions, my 
reverence for sacred times and places, my fasts, 
my penitences, my abstinence from secular 
amusements, my zeal for the interests of the 
church, my liberal contributions to foreign and 
domestic missions, to the spread of bibles and 
tracts, and whatever other enterprises the church 
appoints ; be, when sincerely carried out, a 
good thing in God's sight : if they constitute 
a basis of discrimination in His sight between 
me and other men who are utterly indifferent 
to such things, (and that they do so every pul- 



204 ' She chooses the Latter. 

pit in the land assures me, and what is more 
lives by assuring me) : then I have an unde- 
niable right to rejoice in God's personal favor 
to me, in His distinguishing grace as it is called; 
and am only too happy to welcome a gospel 
which so thoroughly authenticates all my native 
pride and lust of distinction. 



CHAPTER XII. 

Our true righteousness, the righteousness which 
God Himself operates in human nature, is spir- 
itual not moral. It consists in no religious ac- 
tivity whatever, nor in any activity of any sort, 
but altogether in a spirit of unity with our 
brother, in a temper of perfect equality or fel- 
lowship between man and man. 1 Our moral 
experience has been wholly subordinate to this 
Divine end. Yet the church habitually miscon- 
ceives our Providential destiny to the extent of 
regarding morality as itself a Divine end, and 
would consequently have prolonged the contro- 
versy between flesh and spirit — between base 
and superstructure — to all eternity, if the secu- 
lar scientific understanding of man had not be- 
come Providentially aroused to its mission, and 
assumed to itself the guardianship of our asso- 
ciated destiny. What can be more incongruous 
with every Divine inspiration — what can be 
more odious, speaking after the manner of men 
of course, to the Divine mind — than the lesson 
which the church habitually inculcates upon the 
world, namely : the paramount claims which the 
interests of every man's own personal salvation 
at God's hands, have upon his attention and ac- 

1 See Appendix, Note C. 



206 To be Saved or Damned means, 

tivity? What can more fatally degrade the 
mind, than the persuasion so diligently fostered 
by the church, that God Himself is privy to 
these paltry personal anxieties of ours, accessory 
to these most shabby because most selfish aspi- 
rations on our part ; that He is even then in 
fact best pleased with us, when our concern for 
ourselves has grown so importunate, as to make 
us shamelessly indifferent to what becomes of 
other men ? 

Of course no sane man can help cherishing 
the liveliest desire to grow in the knowledge of 
the Divine perfection, and livingly to illustrate 
it in the tenor of his own personal history. In- 
deed no sane man, if we use the word sanity in 
its highest sense, can help the endeavor to shape 
his life and understanding into the exactest im- 
agery of the Divine ; nor can any such man feel 
his Godward hope enfeebled, however ragged 
meanwhile his religious repute may be, so long 
as this aspiration remains unsmothered, or pre- 
serves its ordinary vivacity to his own conscious- 
ness. But has this man any fear about the sal- 
vation of his soul *? Has he especially any fear 
of losing it through the inertness or indifference 
of his maker ? Has he above all any dread of 
his future well-being becoming compromised by 
the positive ill-will of his creator ; by the senti- 
ment on His part of a petty malice and vindic- 
tiveness which would disgrace a Choctaw? Is 
the soul then in the church's estimation a thing, 
that it is thus liable to outward chances, as the 
being saved or lost at God's arbitrary pleasure? 



Spiritually, to love or hate our Kind. 207 

I thought the soul meant the animating temper 
or spirit of one's life, whether one of conformity 
to all Divine truth and loveliness, or of aban- 
donment to all the lusts of our native pride and 
covetousness. How can one's soul in this view 
be either lost or saved without one's own am- 
plest consent ? If indeed I am a low-minded 
person in the habitual tenor of my intercourse 
with my fellow-men : that is to say, if I habitu- 
ally seek myself first and my neighbor last : I 
shall no doubt " lose my soul " as it is called ; 
but it will clearly be by my own privity, and in 
spite of any amount of religious righteousness I 
may have incidentally contracted in my passage 
through the world. And if I am a pure-minded 
person on the other hand, content to do unto 
others as I would have them do unto me, I shall 
no doubt " save my soul " as it is called ; but it 
will by no means be a salvation of it from any 
danger it encounters at God's hands, but purely 
at the hands of my own presumptuous self-will 
ignorance and wickedness. 

The tap-root of every one's spiritual character 
is the conception he entertains of God : not the 
conception which he inherits, mind you, or lazily 
accepts at the hand of tradition ; but that which 
he cultivates and cherishes ; that which he spon- 
taneously inclines to. If he really conceive 
God to be a being of infinite love; if he per- 
ceive that God is God and worthy of our spon- 
taneous adoration, simply because His love for 
His creatures is wholly untainted by love for 
Himself; then of course he will aim at a spirit- 



208 The tap-root of our Char 'after 

ual conformity with this perfection, and abhor 
nothing so much as an appeal to God's inter- 
ested or mercenary regard. Nothing can more 
revolt a mind thus enlightened than the thought 
of enjoying a blessedness at God's hands, which 
all other men do not equally share. For such a 
man worships God no longer religiously but 
livingly, no longer outwardly but inwardly, hav- 
ing no favors to ask of Him, nor any possible 
bosom aspect towards Him which is not as de- 
void of ulterior design, which is not as intrinsi- 
cally innocent and fragrant with an inmost wor- 
ship, as the bosom aspect of the lily towards the 
sun. If on the other hand he conceive God to 
be a being of infinite self-love, and consequently 
of a vindictiveness unmatched by man or devil : 
a vindictiveness indeed so incomparable that 
hell's eternal torments are said only faintly to 
express its ineffable exhilaration, its insatiate 
gusto and greed : then of course his own an- 
swering self-love will become so preternaturally 
inflamed by the insecurity of his relation to a 
being upon whom he is so dependent, and who 
is yet so essentially unworthy of trust, that the 
demands of religion will necessarily absorb the 
attention which is primarily due to the demands 
of life, and the envenomed pursuit of his own 
safety leave him no breathing-spell of regard to 
bestow upon the interests of his neighbor. 

It is this insane root of self-seeking, a self- 
seeking so fanatical as not to rest till it has 
bound God Himself to its helpless servitude, 
which makes the distinctively " religious " mind 



is our Conception of God. 209 

everywhere clothe itself with such unhandsome 
foliage, everywhere bring forth such unmanly 
fruit. These results "leap at the eyes" in 
Catholic countries where " religion " claims an 
establishment of its own, unrestricted as in 
Protestant countries by the commixture of the 
secular element ; and where consequently it is 
at liberty to ultimate its peculiar instincts in 
every appropriate sensible form. It is very 
curious to observe accordingly how in these 
countries its predominant animus of selfishness 
betrays itself, in the dishonor which is most 
religiously cast upon the procreative faculty. 
The church declares that religion has no prac- 
tical aim but to save the soul of its votary alive 
for another world than this ; that it has no pro- 
ductive uses accordingly in this world ; and that 
every one who worthily bears its name should 
therefore compel himself to celibacy : thus out- 
raging the noblest sentiment of our nature, that 
which most enshrines the creative benignity 
since it furnishes the sole foundation of the 
social instinct, namely, the chaste reciprocal love 
of the sexes : and driving men and women — 
for nature must somehow have her own in 
everybody — either to dishonest delights which 
degrade the mind, or else to solitary vices which 
shatter God's living temple itself, the holy hu- 
man body. 1 It shuts up the sexes each by itself 
in great dungeons denominated religious-houses, 
where God's shrinking angels overhear nothing 
more honest than the sobs of heavenly innocence 

1 See Appendix, Note D. 
14 



210 The unhandsome Fruits 

tortured into guilt; it denaturalizes all true man- 
hood in its monks, by making their aims purely 
passive and personal; it libels all true woman- 
hood in the person of its nuns, by turning them 
from fruitful wives and mothers into barren 
professional nurses ; it clothes both monk and 
nun with garments revolting to sense ; and 
stamps them all over with such an ostentatious 
desecration of the body, as reveals to your very 
senses how close the connection is between spir- 
itual pride within the bosom — the pride of a 
peculiar sanctity, of a relation to God unshared 
by other men — and the grossest outward car- 
nality. One reconciles himself after a while to 
the sight of priest and monk abroad : for we 
men are such born nuisances as yet everywhere, 
especially under our European or moral form 
of development, which exhibits the heart or 
feminine element abjectly servile to the head or 
masculine element, that a mere ritual righteous- 
ness would seem to be our proper badge, the 
only approximation we can yet make to God's 
image. But woman when exempted from our 
bedevilment, when loosed from our gross Adamic 
servitude, and left to herself, to her own sponta- 
neous tendencies, is gentle and modest and good: 
/. e. lives already and does not merely aspire to 
live ; obeys a direct Divine inspiration, con- 
ceives of the holy Ghost, and brings forth im- 
maculate fruit. She has no aptitude for ritual 
religion save as a way of escape from our bru- 
tality, from the dreariness we impose upon her 
existence. For she herself when freely pro- 



of Catholic Religiosity. 2 1 1 

nounced is truly the consummation of the literal 
church, the end of all the culture the race has 
undergone on earth ; perfect womanhood in 
nature meaning nothing more and nothing less 
than the visible form of our unseen spiritual 
manhood. Woman is the normal outcome — 
at once perfect flower and perfect fruit — of 
human progress in interior invisible realms of 
being: so that we may at any time exactly 
measure the comparative advance of the public 
mind, the comparative spirituality of the public 
conscience, by the esteem it accords and the 
courtesy it decrees to woman. 

The commixture of the secular element with 
the " religious " is precisely what differences the 
Protestant evolution of religion from the Cath- 
olic. The two churches are respectively letter 
and spirit, body and soul, root and stem, seed 
and flower : which is what makes them so cor- 
dially inimical to each other, and so desirous to 
get out of each other's grasp. The Protestant 
church germinates in Catholicism ; the Catholic 
church effloresces in Protestantism. They are 
respectively gross carnal husk, and refined spirit- 
ual fruit. Thus Catholicism restricts " religion " 
to its priests and other emasculate orders, and 
allows the laity no nearness to God but what 
comes through their intercession ; to that extent 
at all events keeping the laity humble and sweet, 
/. e. uncorroded by the " religious " virus, or the 
pretension of a peculiar sanctity towards God. 
And Protestantism does nothing hereupon but 
deny the " religious " celibacy, or proceed to 



212 The subtler but more harmful 

make it fruitful by marrying it to the secular 
life ; so in effect covering the whole congrega- 
tion with the priestly pretension, and turning all 
that was before humble and sweet into flatulent 
and sour. 1 In the Jewish church the Lord had 
respect to one person, to him who was of a con- 
trite spirit, or felt himself none the better for 
the national holiness. So also in the Catholic 
church there was one element not unlovely, be- 
cause it was devoid of religious pretension; and 
this was the lay element. But Protestantism 
logically robs the Lord even of this delight, by 
exalting the layman into the clerk, or diffusing 
the odor of sanctity over the whole congrega- 
tion : so reorganizing between herself and the 
world the self-same odious discrimination which 
Catholicism enacted within the household of 
faith, or between priest and layman. Catholi- 
cism stigmatizes its priest alone to a spiritual 
regard ; stamps the man who separates himself 
from the common life of his kind, and ostenta- 
tiously devotes himself to God, with an unlove- 
liness palpable even to sense : but it leaves the 
great common life untouched. And moreover 
it allows this priest himself to assume only an 
official or representative holiness, and denies 
him the least personal consequence : so leaving 
open a clean door of escape from the spiritual 
peril involved in the office, to every one whose 

1 It is obvious of course that ferent to the ruling spirit of the 

I am here characterizing these church, and unhurt by it ; though 

churches as to their logical signifi- unhappily it is only a numerical, 

cance only. The vast majority of by no means an influential ma- 

either church is practically indif- jority. 



Fruits of Protestantism. 2 1 3 

cultivated instincts avert them from it. But 
Protestantism remorselessly obliterates every 
vestige of this original Divine mercy, by deny- 
ing the discrimination of priest and layman, and 
teaching its layman indeed to aspire to a sanc- 
tity to which the Catholic priest theoretically 
makes no pretension, a direct personal sanctity 
in the last degree revolting to truth and de- 
cency. 

In Protestant countries accordingly you miss 
those gross outward and therefore comparatively 
harmless fruits, which grow out of the separa- 
tion of the two elements. You see no fat lazy 
loafing monks, images of man's essential arro- 
gance and imbecility : no starched demure 
stealthy-paced nuns, images of the lifeless wom- 
anhood engendered by such a manhood ; a man- 
hood that robs woman of her native juices, 
betrays her essential conjugality, falsifies her 
rightful maternity, leaves her teeming womb 
unquickened, and turns the stainless nurture of 
her bosom to waste. 1 You see rather those 
subtler interior forms of evil which flow from 
the commixture of the two elements while as yet 
such commixture is regarded as itself a Divine 
finality, or is not seen to be wholly tributary to 
ulterior social ends. Protestant men and women, 

1 The nun reproduces Eve al- Eve herself in her undeveloped 

most to sight in her rib-state, or or rib-state symbolizes the un- 

before she became Divinely qual- quickened selfhood or freedom 

ified to attract the man's desire, of man, its condition while still 

It is curious to observe how me- in contented vassalage to natural 

chanical and osseous an aspect appetite and passion, before moral 

the nun's conventional costume consciousness has dawned, 
and demeanor impart to her. 



214 When the Son of Man cometh, 

those who have any official or social consequence 
in the church, are apt to exhibit a high-flown 
religious pride, a spiritual flatulence and sour- 
ness of stomach, which you do not find under 
the Catholic administration. Get over the visi- 
ble wall of separation between you and the 
priest, between you and the religieuse ; get be- 
neath the serge of the one and the buckram of 
the other; and you will find a jolly soul of man 
attuned to all natural fellowship in joy or grief; 
you will find a soft womanly heart instinct with 
conjugal grace and maternal tenderness. But 
our conspicuous Protestant religiosities male and 
female — such of them as are really animated 
by the spirit of Protestantism — are sweeter on 
the surface than in the depths. Their moral 
fine-linen disguises any amount of spiritual 
squalor. For they believe themselves personally 
appreciable to the Lord's heart ; make the cul- 
mination of their faith to consist in " a personal 
assurance " towards God or confidence of accep- 
tance at His hands, which is proof against all 
adverse probabilities, and therefore intensely in- 
sulting to more modest natures. The deeper 
you descend in Protestantism the worse, spir- 
itually considered, do you find its logical results; 
until at last you get down to our modern Revi- 
valism, which is religion stripped of its last rag 
of modesty, of its last decorous vestige of typi- 
cality, denuded of all that superb spiritual or 
universal significance which once inwardly sanc- 
tified it, and reduced to a grovelling mercan- 
tile commerce between God and the soul, in- 



shall He find Faith on the Earth ? 215 

expressibly repugnant to the spiritual truth of 
the case. 

It is an observation very frequently made, 
that the least nutritive and exhilarating men one 
encounters anywhere nowadays, are either men 
of office in the technical church, or else of emi- 
nence in that factitious society upon which the 
church habitually browses. The most ungener- 
ous style of manhood now visible to a spiritual 
regard, seems precisely what is required for the 
highest places of our Zion ; men who suffocate 
God's free breathing in you whenever you ap- 
proach them, and fairly force upon you the con- 
viction that professional religion — whatever 
great uses once redeemed it — is now become 
fatal to all humane culture, and attractive only 
to the vain, the frivolous, the despotic, the self- 
seeking. I know perfectly that vast numbers in 
the technical church do not spiritually belong to 
it, and no more dream of cherishing an eccle- 
siastical or any other personal claim to God's 
favor, than they dream of renouncing it. But 
to say nothing of the obvious dislocation which 
every such mind when much in earnest about 
religious things, is under in having any ecclesi- 
astical position ; to say nothing of the inevitable 
conflict and anguish every such mind must more 
or less reap in that position : it suffices to reflect 
that such persons, like similar persons every- 
where, are what they are only by virtue of the 
unimpeded indwelling of God's impartial spirit ; 
thus by virtue of their individual exemption 
from the ecclesiastical temper, and by no means 



2i6 The Jew and the Christian 

of their subjection to it. The church-spirit is 
now precisely what it was at Christ's literal ad- 
vent, the concentrated spirit of hell in all its 
true votaries : so that we daily see the truth of 
Christ's words illustrated on every hand, when 
he said that at his second or invisible spiritual 
coming, the opposition he should encounter 
would be not from the world but from the 
church : from those who having always been 
most eager to cover him with their slavering 
personal adulation, while they were utterly re- 
creant to his spiritual obedience, would gnash 
their teeth in unaffected rage, at finding them- 
selves passed by and the technical infidel and 
worldling welcomed. 

Yet we have the hardihood to talk of the 
Jew, and denounce his implacable self-righteous- 
ness, his implacable animosity to Divine things : 
as if the true Judaea, the only Judsea God sees 
or cares about, were not a spiritual country, the 
Judsea of the uncultivated human heart whether 
nominally Pagan or Christian. The true Jew in 
the authentic spiritual sense of the designation, 
is to be found skulking in every most baptized 
nook and cranny of our orthodox Christian bo- 
soms; and the puny crucifixion to which his car- 
nal prototype subjected the Lord of life in the 
letter, is but an image of that which we daily 
reenact with keener cruelty in the spirit. The 
Jew is only a luminous Providential type of the 
universal religious conscience, before it has un- 
dergone the softening influence of history ; of 
that proud diabolic temper which urges every 



respectively Type and Substance, 217 

man of strictly ecclesiastical lineage and nurture, 
to make much of the flimsy formal peculiarities 
which distinguish him from other men, in utter 
contempt of that real and spiritual destitution 
which obliterates these superficial differences, 
and makes him profoundly one with all other 
men. The only conscience the religious man 
should have is a conscience of sin, and conse- 
quently of unaffected death to every cherished 
personal pretension. He in whom religion has 
done its perfect work, or fulfilled its errand of 
death, is a man of such unforced humility as to 
be necessarily full of generosity towards all 
other men. He is not only incapable of desir- 
ing, he cannot even endure any evidence of, a 
tenderer Divine regard towards himself than 
towards the veriest reprobate who expiates his 
crimes on the gallows. 

Plain as all this is, there is yet no genuine 
churchman throughout Christendom, from the 
pope of Rome down to Brigham Young, who 
does not practically reproduce the Jewish infatu- 
ation ; who does not most religiously claim an 
absolute or individual consequence in God's 
sight ; who does not in other words aspire to 
win God's personal notice and approbation. 
Our religious development could have done 
us no harm, if we had only borne in mind 
that religion was never intended to be a final- 
ity, but at best only an exquisite type or 
mould by the final breaking up of which a 
very real life of man would emerge, a life of 
genuine fellowship and love : and that conse- 



2i8 Religion is now the Idol 

quently whenever it was valued for its own 
sake and apart from this most human use, it 
would become an unmixed nuisance. Yet this 
is precisely what the church has brought upon 
us. A religious good name, the admiration of 
the devout world, is the subtlest remaining lure 
that hell offers to human vanity. Many a man 
accordingly who wouldn't give the toss of a 
copper to save the human race from perdition, 
who wouldn't put his heel where his toe stands 
to save a brother from the gallows, or snatch a 
sister from the stews, except for the public odium 
of the thing ; yet manifests a frenzied zeal and 
particularity of devout observance, which would 
impoverish the soul of a mouse. We are so 
insanely bent on securing God's favor to us in- 
dividually, on achieving our own personal sal- 
vation at His reluctant hands, that we have no 
thought or credence to bestow upon his great 
and only work, which is that of our common 
natural redemption. Our insane dread of God's 
personal damnation, our insane hope of His 
personal salvation, so inflame all that is basest 
and most selfish in our natures, that we have al- 
most no faculty left for comprehending His de- 
signs of universal love. We are brutally con- 
tent in fact to let the whole race go to the devil, 
provided we can succeed in saving our own pig- 
my souls alive. As if God had ever proposed 
so hopeless a labor to us ! As if He had ever 
set us individually to redeem ourselves from our 
native infirmity, and restore our hearts a pure 
offering to Him ! On the contrary He invaria- 



of Men's impure Devotion. 219 

bly challenges this as His own exclusive prerog- 
ative, and bids us behold it perfectly vindicated 
in the splendors of Christ's redemption. He 
has always been quite rich enough to do without 
our help, and our sole misery has been, that we 
have so twisted religion from a sincere testimony 
of this truth into a lying witness of its precise 
opposite, that we are now sophisticated appar- 
ently past all hope of recovery. 

Yes, religion is now become the idol of men's 
impure devotion, the one conventional decency 
which more effectually separates man from God 
as to the spirit of his mind, than all the techni- 
cal vice and crime extant. The pretension of 
the church to be something more than a typical 
economy, to organize in fact the distinction of 
sacred and profane among men as they stand 
severally related to her interests, and give it the 
sanction of God's approbation, has been so long 
unquestioned as to render a spiritual conviction 
of sin the rarest of actual accomplishments, by 
leading almost all men to believe that this dis- 
tinction of the church and the world finds its 
true authentication in God's infinite perfection, 
rather than our carnal infirmity. The church 
everywhere maintains that the true aim of relig- 
ion has been to attest a difference in human vir- 
tue, to certify that certain persons are purer and 
better in God's estimation than other persons, 
and will enjoy a superior felicity at His hands. 
The truth is most exactly and intensely contrary. 
The total religious experience of the race has 
taken place in the interest of our humility not 



220 The sole Force of Religion 

of our pride. The whole meaning of the tech- 
nical church on earth — and this accounts for 
the very limited empire it has had — has been 
to intensify the pretension of a private right- 
eousness among men, or draw it out in great 
legible characters plain to every sense, in order 
the more signally to explode it, by proving that 
there is absolutely nothing common or unclean 
in humanity, that the Divine hand hallows what- 
soever it touches. Religion was never intended 
to give its followers life but death ; was never 
intended to affirm our individual wealth but our 
universal penury. It was intended to reveal to 
them the dearth of life they have in themselves 
as morally or finitely constituted, in order to 
prepare them for that fulness of life they shall 
find in each other as socially constituted. The 
sole office of the church has been the perfect 
manifestation of the evil which is in us as natu- 
rally begotten; in order to our adequate appre- 
ciation of that infinite good which shall be in 
us as Divinely created. Its invariable genuine 
function has been so to stir up and work out in 
visible form the latent pride and covetousness of 
the human bosom, that we should be compelled 
of ourselves to loathe and renounce them, and in 
that sincere way become fitted for our eternal 
beatitude. The history of the church is the his- 
tory of human corruption; and the only emphatic 
testimony it bears is to the slender reliance which 
is to be placed upon the most devout pretensions. 
No man accordingly is in so dangerous a condi- 
tion spiritually, or with reference to his true life, 



Purgative not Nutritive. 221 

as he who finds his religion a comfort to him. 
Religion is essentially a state of dis-ease, and he 
to whom it brings repose may assure himself 
that the root of the matter is not in him. The 
less our religion satisfies us, the more it mortifies 
and vexes us, the nearer we are to that benign 
and blessed life to which alone it is destined to 
minister. The end of all religious culture is so 
to disgust us with the responsibility of our own 
souls, with the provision of our own righteous- 
ness, as to make us heartily renounce it, and ac- 
cept life of mere mercy at God's hands instead. 
It chases our selfishness into its most specious 
retreats; it ferrets it out of its most sanctified 
strong-holds ; and fills us at length with so cor- 
dial a shame, with a mind so full of repentance 
towards the patient all suffering all yielding Love, 
that the natural aristocracy of our hearts, — their 
prevalent lust of distinction — confesses itself the 
sheer spiritual vulgarity it is ; and one would 
henceforth go to hell rather than heaven, unless he 
could go there upon a strictly democratic footing. 
To say the whole thing in one word : the 
efficacy of religion is totally and intensely pur- 
gative ; and he who insists upon finding it nu- 
tritive errs from the way of life altogether. The 
most living men in history, those who have 
evinced the profoundest spiritual quickening, 
have felt the most harrowing and pertinacious 
conscience of sin, have pungently discerned the 
hopeless spiritual rottenness which lay concealed 
under their fairest moral and religious seeming. 
Such men accordingly have felt the imperious 



222 The true Enemy of God is 

need of a really Divine righteousness, and have 
spurned the empty typicality of the church 
whenever she has pretended to appease that 
immortal want. They see that God's quarrel 
is never with the obvious and conceded evil of 
mankind, because evil ever tends by its own 
limitation to punish and correct itself: and be- 
sides God's sole creative delight and vocation 
is to redeem men out of their admitted evil : 
but only with its most unquestioned and estab- 
lished good. The true enemy of God from 
the beginning of history has never been our 
poverty but our wealth; has never been our 
disease but our health ; has never been our sins 
but always our most unsuspected and accredited 
righteousness. The sinner in other words and 
not the saint is as yet God's best achievement 
in human nature : when this achievement be- 
comes somewhat universalized by society itself 
coming to the consciousness of its shortcom- 
ings, we shall at last have a righteousness and 
a health and a wealth which shall never pass 
away, which shall be for the first time on earth 
Divine and permanent. The sinner, the man 
who most feels the disproportion which nature 
puts him under towards God, and therefore 
best appreciates the boundless mercy of their 
spiritual conjunction, is the cordial friend of 
God, is unaffectedly genial and easy to be en- 
treated, lending himself freely to every hu- 
mane enterprise and endeavor. It is in the 
heart of the sullen devotee alone that you 
hear the gnawing of the worm that never 



the Saint not the Sinner. 223 

dies, the worm of an insatiate spiritual pride ; 
and feel the heat of that devouring flame 
which can never be quenched, the flame of 
an ambition so aspiring that if prudence were 
not painfully imposed upon it it would over- 
top the throne of God itself. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

No one can know better than myself how 
exquisitely revolting to our professional relig- 
ious pride, all the preceding strain of sentiment 
must necessarily appear. But then we must 
remember that our current religious pride is the 
indisputable inward truth of which the Jew was 
but the outward visible type; the profound spir- 
itual substance of which he was the flimsy nat- 
ural symbol or shadow. We exhibit spiritually 
to all the extent of the ecclesiastical temper in 
us, the very same relation to the Divine Truth 
that he exhibited literally ; a relation of pro- 
fessed zealous allegiance but of real indifference 
and hostility, of real denial and betrayal. We 
have reached the climax of the church's spirit- 
ual history prefigured by the apostleship of Ju- 
das Iscariot : for all the personal incidents of 
Christ's history are so many most strict types or 
shadows of what is actually transpiring in the 
unseen depths of our Christian bosoms. Thus 
the literal crucifixion which he underwent at 
the hands of Jew and Roman, only typified the 
spiritual betrayal and crucifixion his truth should 
undergo at the hands of Christian priests and 
kings. And yet even as this literal crucifixion 
was the sign of a great Divine mercy to be ac- 



God's Kingdom to come on Earth. 225 

complished by the fall of Jerusalem, and the 
consequent spread of the Christian church over 
the whole area of the Roman empire : so now 
the spiritual crucifixion which the truth is un- 
dergoing at the hands of the church, is itself 
in its turn but the harbinger of an awful and 
undreamt-of Divine mercy to the world. For 
this infidelity of the church to the spirit of its 
Founder, is only a signal Providential demon- 
stration of the incompetency of the mere relig- 
ious conscience spiritually to fulfil the Christian 
truth; livingly to reflect or reproduce the Di- 
vine spirit ; and a precious pledge therefore of 
that superb resurrection to life which it is soon 
to undergo in all the features of our social man- 
hood, in all the forms of our spontaneous or 
aesthetic activity. 

This indeed is the grand burden of the gos- 
pel : the establishment of God's kingdom on 
earth, or the reduction of the natural mind 
itself to permanent Divine order : because this 
consummation alone as we shall see by and by 
guarantees both the integrity and the perma- 
nence of the spiritual creation. What we call 
a conviction of sin in the individual mind has 
had no other end than to pave the way for a 
similar generalized conviction in the total mind 
of society. The dogma of individual regenera- 
tion is only a rude imperfect germ and prophecy 
of the higher truth of our universal natural re- 
generation in the Christ : has had no other pur- 
pose than temporarily to house this grander 
truth, until such time as the human mind should 
15 



226 Man a Microcosm ; 

be Providentially ripe to receive it. And the 
thing now most incumbent upon all those who 
have the least spiritual discernment of Christ's 
work, is as I have already said, to revivify and 
aggrandize the old dogma by lifting it at once 
out of its wholly lifeless and Pharisaic private 
interpretation, into its true spiritual scope and 
dignity in application to the race exclusively. 

Whatsoever is true of the individual in his 
degree, is true of the race in its degree. Human 
society, human fellowship, human equality, hu- 
man brotherhood, which constitutes the achieve- 
ment of God's spirit in our nature, or the per- 
fection of man's destiny on earth, comes about 
precisely as my reader's and my individual re- 
generation does, namely: by such a manifesta- 
tion to men's minds of the evils that are inci- 
dent to our rudimentary unscientific methods of 
intercourse, as will make them heartily ashamed 
of themselves, heartily sick of their sacerdotal 
and political guides, and lead them eventually 
to demand what are those Divine laws of order 
for man in nature, which shall insure us pure 
souls in healthy bodies. The seeming obduracy 
of the heavens to our suffering, which so often 
strikes us with amazement, is in truth but the 
outward form of the Divinest pity; because 
what the Divine pity wants to work in us by 
permitting us this acute experience of evil 
physical and moral, is a conviction of our spir- 
itual rottenness, or the humiliation of our infer- 
nal pride in ourselves, which is the hidden and 
sole source of these manifest forms of evil, and 



the Cosmos a Grand Man. 227 

which has only got to be recognized in order to 
insure their eternal drying up. Moral and 
physical evil will abound and increase upon us, 
until we learn to distrust our own public right- 
eousness, until we learn to scrutinize the spirit 
we are of socially, and demand whether the 
cause of this evil is not in our prevalent inhu- 
manity one to another as organized in our boast- 
ed political and religious institutions. When 
we are thus driven to explore the true causes of 
the hideous evils we are undergoing, we shall 
at once get rid of them not only temporarily but 
eternally ; not only vacate the present existence 
of them, but put away all possible ground of 
their future recurrence. 

Crime vice and poverty are to the social body, 
what deafness small-pox and the loss of children 
are to me. They are odious disgusting things, 
producing the utmost possible discomfort, and 
leading thoughtful minds to inquire their mean- 
ing, to demand where the blame of them lies. 
The Lord cannot be bribed to take the least 
interest in these passing troubles any more than 
he does in my toothache and jaundice ; because 
what He yearns for in both cases alike is not our 
present escape from evil merely, but our eternal 
exemption from all liability to it. How does 
such exemption come about socially % Why by 
society itself in the person of its leading minds 
feeling the precise conviction, acknowledging 
the precise conscience, of sin, that my reader 
and I feel and acknowledge : by society herself 
seriously setting out to do justice to all her 



228 The Heart of Men much 

members, or organizing herself in strict accord- 
ance with the truth of every man's equality with 
every other man. We think that God hates 
the thief, the adulterer, the murderer, and ap- 
plauds us decent people when we send them to 
prison and the scaffold. There is no grosser 
superstition. We it is who, spiritually viewed, 
are in His pure sight the true thieves adulterers 
and murderers; because we in our overpowering 
lust of mammon are content to live in such glar- 
ing relations of inequality one with another, as 
virtually condemn the vast majority of men 
to degrading want and ignorance, and lift a 
smaller class into idle and superfluous abun- 
dance. Only when we shall be brought to 
view ourselves somewhat in this light; only 
when we rich and reputable ones of the earth 
become, through the ever growing tyranny of 
these atrocious forms of disease vice and crime 
quickened to perceive our own complicity in 
them, and humble our proud heads to the extent 
of beseeching science to tell us what God's so- 
cial requirements in human nature are : shall we 
find our evils abating, and our long dismal night 
of anguish giving way to the beams of God's 
healing and eternal day. 

Nothing stands in the way of this great con- 
summation, I repeat, but the persistent dishonor 
which our hereditary orthodoxy does the Divine 
name, in belittling His mercy to the dimensions 
of the mere private soul, and rendering it indif- 
ferent to the awful wants of the race. Every- 
where but in the church itself you find men 



in advance of their Head. 229 

ready to perceive, that Christ had no private 
personal ends, but only a universal one ; which 
was the redemption of our very nature itself 
from disease and death. The Christian facts, 
the wondrous words and deeds of Christ, so 
authenticate and inflame the generosity and 
manliness of the public conscience, as to make 
it intolerable for us any longer to conceive that 
God looks upon any portion of his creation as 
hopelessly degraded : as to lead us in fact to 
suspect that what we with our finite outward 
sense see to be positive degradation, He with 
His infinite inner eye sees to be so much nega- 
tive spiritual advance. One's heart revolts from 
the current orthodoxy, even before his head is 
able to justify the revolt by chapter and verse. 
I am sure I never at my blindest prayed to God 
half so earnestly to save my own soul, as to be 
saved from those excruciating thoughts of Him 
which tempted me to fear that anybody's soul 
could ever lack at His hands all the succor and 
furtherance it needed. 

At any rate Christianity is a full response to 
all such idle fears. It bears a far more direct 
relation to the public life of man than to the 
individual one. Its whole bearing indeed upon 
the private bosom, is a fruit of its bearing upon 
the destiny of the race ; and is strictly unintelli- 
gible apart from it. The doctrine of the Divine 
Natural Humanity, or of Christ's Divine glori- 
fication down to his actual flesh and bones, im- 
plies of course that God's great redemption is 
wrought not in isolated individual minds here 



230 Regeneration is possible only 

and there, but in the very stuff of human na- 
ture itself, in the commonest affections appetites 
and passions of universal man : a redeeming re- 
generating and transforming work, which shall 
lift all mankind into intimate and endless union 
with God, and so become the basis of a new 
spiritual development in the individual soul 
past all prophecy to foretell. Every church on 
earth is doomed to perish, except the Christian 
church ; because all but it are destitute of a 
philosophic basis, that is, profess no doctrine of 
God in nature, but only in the private soul. 
The Christian church is immortal because its 
fundamental dogma involves a doctrine of God 
in nature so ample and clear, as to satisfy every 
profoundest want of the heart and every most 
urgent demand of the head towards God for- 
ever. Christianity, which on its literal side is 
an affirmation of the perfect union of the Di- 
vine and Human natures in Christ, means on 
its interior spiritual side neither more nor less 
than this : that underneath our reviled despised 
and unhandsome nature, underneath all its las- 
civiousness and avarice and tyrannous self-seek- 
ing of whatever kind, there yet lie unsuspected 
such capacities of disinterested action, of jubi- 
lant self-abandonment, of cordial devotion to 
productive use, of chaste and generous love, of 
magnanimous friendship, of childlike innocence 
and peace in short in every sphere of activity, 
as will make all that men have feebly dreamt 
of heaven yet inevitable upon earth. We have 
long agreed that God was capable of doing very 



through a Redemption of Nature. 231 

wonderful things for us spiritually, or by means 
of our strictly individual regeneration : but we 
never dared to suppose that this was only be- 
cause He was capable of doing so much more 
wonderful things for our nature. And yet this 
is the exact truth of the case, if Christianity be 
true, which suspends our individual regeneration 
upon our acknowledgment of the redemption ef- 
fected by Christ in our nature. " The regeneration 
of a man," says Swedenborg in his Coronis, or 
Appendix to the True Christian Religion, "which 
is his liberation from evils and falsities, is a par- 
ticular redemption by the Lord, existing from 
his general redemption." 

But Christianity does not merely tell us that 
God is able and willing to bring nature itself 
up to the point of a complete redemption from 
evil : it tells us that this redemption is already 
virtually accomplished in the life of Christ. All 
the events of Christ's birth life death and resur- 
rection were only so many ultimate tokens or 
natural effects of the accomplishment of this 
great result in interior realms of being. These 
events all took place in nature because the Di- 
vine Love is so infinitely able, beyond our poor 
imagination to conceive, to reconcile self-love 
and brotherly love, or hell and heaven, in the 
inmost invisible heart of the race, as that a new 
life shall thereby take place on earth more glo- 
rious to God, more blessed to man, than it has en- 
tered into the heart of angel or of seraph to con- 
ceive : a life in which the hitherto despised and 
rejected principle of self-love (evil or hell) be- 



232 In Christ God is revealed 

comes itself the invincible guarantee of endless 
peace and order. It is the distinctive splendor 
of the Christian truth that it alone has dared to 
make not the saint but the sinner, not the angel 
but the devil, not good but evil, the inexpug- 
nable bulwark of God's power. All of our men- 
dicant theologies and philosophies recoil before 
this ghastly face of evil. Only that patient and 
faultless life begun in Bethlehem and ended on 
Calvary, tells us to what endless human worth, 
to what boundless human and Divine delight, 
the existence of what we call evil is in God's 
great unstinted providence spontaneously sub- 
servient. Christ was born subject to the most 
diabolic fanaticism ever enkindled on earth ; the 
fanaticism of the Jew in behalf of a kingdom 
of God which should put all nations under the 
Jewish feet. Of course like every child he be- 
lieved his natural traditions with unsuspecting 
confidence; listened devoutly to the recorded 
promises of God to bless Israel and Judah with 
unheard of blessing; and saw himself with 
childish pleasure pointed to by all about him as 
the person through whom these long-waiting 
promises were to be at last fulfilled. Put your- 
self reader, in that tender child's place. Would 
it have been easy, think you, to have resisted 
what he resisted ? To have spurned from your 
lip the brimming cup of devout intoxication 
which he spurned from his ? No human being, 
neither parent friend nor teacher, stood by to 
help him in those dire moments against his own 
devout patriotic natural heart. Every one about 



as a glorified Natural Man. 233 

him on the contrary joyfully sided with his great 
temptation, and did his stupid best to render it 
irresistible. It was a temptation more subtle 
and deadly, more heaped up pressed down and 
running over with the combined and concentrat- 
ed virus both of heaven and hell, than ever man 
before or since confronted ; and he confronted 
it all alone. He stood indeed more alone, that 
is, less helped by human sympathy or intelli- 
gence, than any man ever stood in human his- 
tory, dazzled, amazed, confounded, but never 
overcome, by the diabolic lure which both his 
religion and his love of country almost irresisti- 
bly commended to him. Every subtlest hell 
and every infirm heaven known to human expe- 
rience, flowed cordially and unrebuked into a 
personal ambition so patriotic, into a personal 
hope and aspiration so religious. All the heaped 
up avarice of the human heart, all its aspirations 
of religious preeminence, all its lust of spiritual 
and material aggrandizement, all its cherished 
dreams of earthly dominion, of wealth, of pleas- 
ure, of sensual bliss ; all its instincts of love, of 
friendship, of family and national allegiance, 
rushed headlong into the fulfilment of a career 
so conventionally blameless, as the waters of in- 
land rivers rush headlong into the sea : but that 
young bosom, though it sweat blood under the 
unexampled agony of its conflict, never for an 
instant faltered, until it had so perfectly coordi- 
nated within itself the hitherto warring powers 
of self-love and brotherly love (or the profound- 
est hell and the highest heaven) with each other, 



234 In Chris I our Natural Life 

and then reduced them both to the equal alle- 
giance of the Divine or universal love, as to lap 
them both thenceforth in eternal unity ; and give 
consequently to the entire spiritual universe, the 
universe of the human mind, the impress of his 
unitary personality, the impress of a glorified 
natural man. 

To say all in a word. God's sole great pur- 
pose in history is the elevation of the natural 
man himself out of the mud and mire of his 
origin ; or the cleansing and building up of our 
very bodies themselves into temples of the 
Holy Ghost, so that they will no longer ob- 
struct but only promote the soul. Christianity 
implies above all things else a life of innocence, 
of spotless innocence, for man on earth . the 
sooner accordingly we take our brethren out of 
want and ignorance by giving them social recog- 
nition and so restoring them to God, the sooner 
we shall find ourselves enjoying the unspeaka- 
ble delights of God's kingdom upon earth. No 
man does evil untempted ; that is, without he 
have all other men to help him do it by stand- 
ing aloof from him, or leaving him in abject 
penury physical moral and spiritual. Let us 
therefore when society points to her thieves her 
adulterers her murderers, saying lo ! the sinners ! 
boldly give her the lie, saying : " What does all 
this paltry evil-doing on their part amount to 
when weighed against your stupendous and un- 
conscious evil-being, your organized and spirit- 
ual inclemency of man to man? These men 
indeed are hideous forms of evil-doers ; they sin 



is made Divinely Innocent 235 

flagrantly against your conventions ; but it is 
only because your conventions first stint their 
nature of its fair expansion, deny it its due and 
honest satisfactions. You are, first of all, a nig- 
gard steward to them of Divine bounties ; and 
God's quarrel therefore is primarily with you 
and only indirectly with them." 

Our hereditary ecclesiastical habits of mind 
however have left us so little spiritual innocence, 
have so inflamed us with mercenary intentions 
towards God, so armed us with every sneaking 
private personal design upon His bounty, that 
we are quite as blind to the actual truth of 
things as our Jewish prototype himself was, 
and find ourselves exposed to precisely similar 
judgments. Surely no nation was ever more 
punctilious in its purely religious worship than 
ours was two short years ago. Yet here we are 
to-day politically rent and peeled as by the light- 
ning of a Divine displeasure. What is the in- 
ference *? What can it be but that God had a 
just disdain of our hypocrisy, of our complacent 
religious comedy ; that He saw it to indicate no 
living sympathy with His excellent name but 
only a zealous desire to cajole and keep Him 
quiet, while we were filling our felonious pock- 
ets with dollars coined out of the sweat and 
blood of His and our helpless ill-starred breth- 
ren % What a scandal it is to Christianity, that 
men professing for nineteen centuries to revere 
its hallowed memorials concerning God and our 
relations to Him, should yet believe Him capa- 
ble of occupying Himself with this ritual rub- 



236 Our religious Life a constant 

bish, 1 while myriads of His own adopted flesh 
and blood are starving even for the base food of 
the body, let alone the nobler food of the mind; 
while the gambling house the grog shop and 
the brothel are recognized necessities of our 
social fabric ; while the interests of one nation 
and one class of men are organized in ruthless 
hostility to those of another nation and another 
class ; while the innocence of youth is offered 
up every day a smoking holocaust upon the 
altars of mammon, and the native purity of 
woman gives only an added zest to the diabolic 
enterprise of her undoing ! Though an angel 
from heaven come to us with any such drivel, 
let us fling back the blasphemy in his brazen 
face. No thoughtful man dare any longer deny 
that God is scandalized past all endurance by our 
prevalent religious hypocrisy, and the boundless 
political effrontery which it engenders. Honest 
minds everywhere are beginning to recognize the 
essential humanity of God, and to disuse these 
old insignia of a Pagan ignorance and imbecil- 
ity. Everywhere men are refusing any longer 
to regard Godas that omnipotent lordly Jupiter 
they once did, revelling in his own unemployed 
strength, and looking down in contempt upon 
modes of life infinitely less luxurious of course, 
but also infinitely sweeter and more honest than 
his own ; his very goodness being at best but an 
occasional caprice of his wanton unprincipled 
power : and are coming to regard Him in His 
Christian aspect exclusively, that is, as an exqui- 

1 See Appendix, Note E. 



Opprobrium to the Divine Name. 237 

sitely human force, with no unemployed or su- 
perfluous strength on hand, all His strength 
indeed being but the ceaseless efflux of His 
unstained goodness and truth, making the winds 
eternally to blow, the waters to flow, and the 
grass to grow, for the sustenance and recreation 
of universal man. It is only as an every way 
present help to our perplexities that God reveals 
Himself in Christ, and no longer as a future 
one ; a help to the very perplexities we are now 
undergoing public and private, social and moral. 
And we are miserably mistaken if we suppose that 
we are going to get His help by cultivating any 
longer a mere religious righteousness ; /. e. by 
fixing our hope upon some life or righteousness 
stored up for us beyond the grave, to the practi- 
cal neglect of that more urgent life or righteous- 
ness which now is. Our eternal interests are of 
course the only real ones ; but these are the in- 
terests of our true manhood, and have therefore 
no more relevancy to the life beyond the grave 
than they have to that now present. They have 
no relevancy to time or space whatever, but only 
to the habitual and cultivated temper of our own 
minds, whether it be one of living conformity 
to the Divine spirit or of merely professed con- 
formity. And I have no belief accordingly that 
he who is willing to postpone these interests 
now out of regard to any conventional interests 
the most sacred, will not find himself just as 
willing to enact a similar postponement after 
death and to all eternity. 

I do not believe for my own part that God 



238 The Life which Christ reveals 

has one lingering grain of respect or tolerance 
left for those idle religious fears which haunt the 
pampered sons of earth with respect to a future 
life, and which they pay solemn clergymen and 
dishonest editors of religious newspapers to 
nurse upon their great lazy knees, now artfully 
inflating them to the most menacing dimensions, 
and anon reducing them by their ingenious 
sophistry to the most pleasing insignificance. 
We are greatly mistaken in supposing that the 
life which Christ reveals, God's true life in man, 
is mere post-mortem existence, or has any particu- 
lar respect to the literal extension of the personal 
consciousness beyond the grave. The distinc- 
tively Christian life is one of spiritual conjunction 
with all Divine innocence and peace, and thence 
alone of perfect power or bliss ; and mere post- 
mortem possibilities have no logical relevancy to 
such a state of things. Does any of my readers 
suppose for example that when the cowardly 
ruffian who assailed Mr. Sumner on the floor of 
the United States senate, died, he became any 
more nearly conjoined with God by that flimsy 
physical event than he was before ? The man's 
spirit did not die ; underwent, so far as we 
know, no humiliation for the atrocious out- 
rage it enacted ; and consequently remained un- 
changed. It was the mere natural body that 
died; so leaving the spirit free to project its 
own future covering, or house itself in a body 
exactly accordant with itself, with its own culti- 
vated character whatever that might be. To 
be conjoined with God, to know the bliss of 



is not mere post-mortem Existence, 239 

heaven, means to be spiritually filled with all 
mercy all gentleness all truth ; and one becomes 
filled with such things, not by any modification 
of his outward relations, his relations to space 
and time, but by inward culture, or gradual 
refinement out of his native dross. And to sup- 
pose one in any better circumstances with respect 
to this end beyond the grave, is, as it seems to 
me, not only gratuitous but extremely derogatory 
to God. Because if the other world exhibit a 
more favorable set of influences with respect to 
our spiritual progress than this world exhibits, 
then clearly God might if He had pleased have 
ordained precisely the same influences here : and 
not having done so, we should be constrained to 
say that He had not done the best thing possible 
for us here : which would be a reflection either 
upon His love or upon His wisdom, or else upon 
both. 

I have no manner of doubt indeed that the 
other life is even less mechanical and arbitrary 
than this ; that the law of spiritual freedom is 
even more absolute there than here : thus that as 
there may be more exquisite virtue and happi- 
ness there, there may also be more exquisite vice 
and misery. I have no fear therefore that as long 
as bullies and bruisers are bred by our imperfect 
society or fellowship, they will not find bigger 
bullies and more remorseless bruisers on the other 
side of death to beat their bullying and their 
bruising out of them ; this capital police use 
justifying the existence of such cattle the while, 
and redeeming it to a low savor of humanity. 



240 God is Perfect Man. 

In short I confess to the very greatest satisfaction 
in believing that God is a perfect man, and that 
the human quality accordingly, which is freedom 
or selfhood, is so respected by Him in all men, 
that no one is ever made better by miraculous 
interference, but only by appeals to his reigning 
love ; i. e. by his being allowed to reap in every 
case the proper fruit of his own actions, and his 
becoming rationally or freely elevated by such 
experience. 1 

1 See Appendix, Note F. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

But let us get back to our subject. 

We have been worshipping God in the relig- 
ious way long enough ; a great deal too long in 
fact. That He means to be worshipped at length 
in a far grander way, that is, in the way of life 
exclusively, which is a way of the exactest spir- 
itual conformity to His spirit, is what is pro- 
claimed, I devoutly believe, by all the dread 
signs and portents we see around us ; signs and 
portents of political corruption disorganization 
and death. We are dying politically in order 
to be resuscitated socially ; for the law of all 
true creation is that it flower out of death, that 
it take on immortality by incorporating death 
itself into its substance. We are thus undergo- 
ing political decease, in order to our final social 
resurrection. We are dying to an old outworn 
temporary - organization, to rise and reappear in 
one which shall never know disease or blight. 
The life which we are upon the verge of realiz- 
ing, the life inaugurated by Christ in human na- 
ture, means an exact accord and no longer the 
slightest vestige of discord between the natural 
and spiritual mind, between the outward and in- 
ward man. The precise and total meaning of 
Christianity, what alone makes it gospel, or qual- 

16 



242 The thorough Redemption 

ifies it to avouch God's highest glory, to estab- 
lish peace on earth, and vindicate God's delight 
in men (iv avOp&Trois evSo/aa, Luke ii. 14) is that it 
affirms the perfect unition of the Divine and 
human natures in Christ, so that we have hence- 
forth a nearness to God which exalts even per- 
sonal cleanliness into godliness, and makes mere 
bodily health a spiritual obligation. We all 
know how through the dismay of kindred, the 
disgust of friends, the disdain of the proud, the 
opprobrium of the vile, the hatred of the de- 
vout and honorable, that most feeble and suffer- 
ing brother steadfastly pursued the bright ideal 
of a love which is infinite, until at last that love 
surrendered itself to his immaculate wooing, to 
his stainless keeping, became unqualifiedly his 
own, became consubstantiate with his personal 
consciousness, so that he could say with perfect 
truth " Henceforth I and my Father are one." 
The expectation of a righteousness on earth 
at all commensurate with human hope, would 
have been utterly fruitless unless some individual 
subject of our nature, in simple fidelity to the 
light within him had thus first compelled self- 
love in his own bosom into such complete sub- 
servience to neighborly love, and then compelled 
neighborly love itself into such complete sub- 
servience to universal love, as to make that 
bosom experience of his react and resound to 
the uttermost limits of God's spiritual dominion ; 
so that every individual bosom within the range 
of that dominion, in which these warring loves 
inhere, must evermore infallibly feel and infalli- 



of Nature in Christ. 243 

bly reflect the influence of that stupendous recon- 
ciliation. For this work, being once done and 
so done, is done forever and for all men ; so that 
wherever we can imagine in the lowest hell a 
form of evil duskier than all its fellows, and in 
the highest heavens a form of good more lus- 
trous than every other form, these two instantly 
find themselves stripped by that great anguish 
of their puny intrinsic antagonism, and forever 
indissolubly blent in a new and Divine manhood 
instinct with an infinite good. 

My son! give me thy heart! is God's sole claim 
upon His creature. The social man alone, and 
for the first time in human history, fully meets 
this claim, because in him alone the heart is dis- 
lodged from its long captivity to the head, and 
so becomes capable at last of bringing forth 
fruit directly to God, bounteous spiritual fruit 
filling the earth with peace. What alone makes 
man the image of God, what exalts the human 
form to the rightful supremacy of nature, is, 
that it puts the heart in the first place, the head 
in the second place, and the hand in the last 
place. To work out this exquisite hierarchy of 
the human form : to give the feminine element 
in life its hard-earned but eternal supremacy of 
the masculine element: has been the secret inspi- 
ration of all past history. Visibly to organize 
this beautiful and permanent order of human 
life ; to release the suffering down-trodden Eve 
of human affection from the coarse defiling 
Adam of the intellect, and exalt her to virgin 
innocence, or empower her to conceive directly 



244 Christ is not a Spirit, 

of the Infinite and bring forth at last that seed 
of long promise which is yet to bruise the ser- 
pent's head : this I repeat has been the one aim 
of God's majestic Providence on earth; and this 
aim stands accomplished only in our perfect 
social manhood ; only in that great redemptive 
work of God's spirit in our nature whereby my 
reader and I, and whatsoever else is alive in 
Christendom, are being gradually moulded out 
of the most depraved moral conditions into the 
dignity of social beings, beings who have a sym- 
pathy and therefore a destiny as wide as the uni- 
verse of God. 

In Christ the ground of our everlasting re- 
joicing, as I have already said, is, that his natu- 
ral, part was glorified ; not merely his spiritual 
part, as is the case in our ordinary regeneration, 
but his downright natural body as well. Not 
his inward spirit alone, but his shrinking cower- 
ing outward body also, lent such faultless obedi- 
ence to every behest of the infinite love in his 
soul, as eventually to discharge itself of its 
merely material or inherited contents, and take 
on living Divine substance instead, so that his 
flesh as we are told saw no corruption. A spirit, 
he said to his astonished disciples after his resur- 
rection, hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have: 
handle me and make sure of the faft. Now in 
inspired speech, which is necessarily symbolic, 
flesh and bones signify the lowest or natural 
things of the mind, the passions and appetites 
we derive from nature. And' consequently by 
Christ's alleged union with God even down to 



hut a Divine Natural Man. 245 

these lowest natural things, is signified that the 
love which we all owe to ourselves will eventu- 
ally be cultivated into such harmony with the 
love we owe our neighbors, and this again be- 
come cultivated into such harmony with the 
love we owe the world or all men, that they will 
be both alike glorified out of all their intrinsic 
antagonism — out of all resemblance to their 
former finite selves — * by becoming both alike 
merged in the unity of the social sentiment, the 
truly infinite or perfect sentiment of a universal 
human brotherhood : so that the rational under- 
standing of man, symbolized by the astonished 
disciples, will thenceforth see Nature herself to 
be Divinely quickened, and even this corrupti- 
ble body of ours brought into living glowing 
conscious unity with God. 

It is striking to observe the discrepancy be- 
tween the face of the New Testament, and the 
puerile theologies which profess to be illuminat- 
ed by it. In the New Testament you read of a 
kingdom of God to be established upon earth ; 
of a Divine operation to be wrought in the 
sphere of the senses ; of a hope which looks for I 
fulfilment to the promised return of Christ to 
take possession of the kingdoms of the world 
and reign forever. The only prayer he taught 
us to address to God, is, that His name might 
be hallowed, His kingdom come, and His will 
be done — on earth as in heaven. Look at our 
theologies, or listen to our preachers thence dis- 
ciplined, and you will find the hope they set be- 
fore their followers to consist in a mere evasion 



246 Swedenborg explodes the Notion 

of the gospel promise, being made to attach ex- 
clusively to a life beyond the grave. Not one 
word of God's promised kingdom upon the 
earth, a kingdom which should be everlasting: 
but any amount of puny naturalism under the 
form of angelic coddling and nursing. Not 
one word of universal man healed, purified, and 
restored to God in that very point where alone 
he needed God's help, his nature : but any 
amount of sentimental nonsense designed to 
comfort well-to-do worldlings against the ner- 
vous fear of death. One would think listening 
to our orthodox pulpit strains that an incident 
over which we have no more power than we 
have over our birth, and which vegetable and 
animal undergo without a groan or a shudder, 
has yet been made by God's wisdom the true 
test of our whimpering manhood, and the only 
suitable goal of its discipline. In a word we 
find God's sole work of mercy operated in our 
very nature, a work of universal redemption 
alone befitting the infinitude of His love, so 
completely overlaid by a piddling doctrine of 
the favoritism He is capable of showing cer- 
tain fussy individual souls here and there, that 
Christ's famous question — nevertheless when the 
Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth? 
— gets a very loud answer. 

I do not know a better reading for anybody 
who wishes to get his imagination effectually 
disenchanted of the illusions which are too apt 
to be cherished on post-mortem conditions gener- 
ally, than the writings of Swedenborg. Swe- 



of any arbitrary Power in God. 247 

denborg renders indeed a much more positive 
service to the mind than this; but a very great 
negative advantage nevertheless derivable from 
his writings to Philosophy, is the very clear light 
they shed upon the indestructibleness of human 
freedom under all circumstances ; so that all 
Divine power is impotent to do a man any 
permanent good, save in the strictest conso- 
nance with its requirements. In all God's deal- 
ings with us He regards the interests of our 
freedom as jealously as a man guards the apple 
of his eye: because without freedom or selfhood 
we should be incapable of spiritual conjunction 
with Him, and so fail of our creation. For this 
reason it is that His great creative work demands 
a natural sphere of ultimation, since whatsoever 
is done in our nature leaves us spiritually uncon- 
strained, or preserves our individual freedom in- 
tact. Swedenborg accordingly unmasks what 
we call " the other world " of its factitious sem- 
blances derived from our egotism and supersti- 
tion, and shows it to be everywhere intensely 
human, glowing with the same vivid life in kind 
— only more intense in degree and more orderly 
in manifestation — as that which now animates 
our bosoms. 

But even in regard to angelic existence, which 
is the point upon which our readiest superstition 
hinges, his books exhibit a very detergent effi- 
cacy. They have it — at least I infer as much 
from their effect on me — as their surest incidental 
or negative result, to dissipate that vague pres- 
tige of superiority which we are wont to attrib- 



248 The Jngel and the Devil 

ute to the angel over man, and to assert for the 
latter the clear supremacy of creation. In read- 
ing Swedenborg I feel myself completely dis- 
abused of the charm which angelic existence 
has always exerted upon my imagination, sim- 
ply because I can in no way reconcile myself 
to that fixed shadow of infernality which he 
honestly declares and proves to be inseparable 
from it. According to Swedenborg, and what 
is more than a myriad Swedenborgs, according 
to common sense, hell is the perpetual shadow 
of heaven, its logical background without which 
heaven could not appear as heaven. No angel, 
as he says, but stands foot to foot with some 
devil ; no society of angels but stands foot to 
foot with some society of devils. What an 
odious glimpse of creation this, if this were all ! 
What an infirm exhibition of Divine power, if 
the angel were its final manifestation ; or if it 
consisted only in eternally antagonizing spirit 
with flesh ! But no ! blessed be God ! He is 
capable of conferring a positive righteousness 
upon His creature, a righteousness which does 
not stand in the mere contrast and elimination 
of evil. In a word He is able to create man in 
whom evil spontaneously subjects itself to good, 
and in whom accordingly life shines forth quite 
infinitely as being wholly undimmed by the 
ghastly and revolting oppugnancy of death. 

The angel according to Swedenborg is formed 
by the elimination or casting out of the devil. 
Thus the devil stands for so much waste human 
force as the angel fails to realize in the process 



both involved in Man. 249 

of his conjunction with God. He expresses the 
angel's infirm natural side ; all that natural in- 
firmity which the latter sheds or separates from 
himself in the process of his regeneration. He 
is merely the gross earthly grub or grovelling 
caterpillar, of which the angel is the emancipat- 
ed soaring butterfly. Hence the more angels 
the more devils ; so that if there were not some 
higher manifestation of the Divine power possi- 
ble than takes place in the angel, the universe 
of nature would be a perpetual prey to the 
rivalry of these unreconciled forces. 

But there is a higher manifestation possible, 
an infinitely higher one, which is the Lord, or 
Divine Natural man. In him this waste hu- 
man force which the angel rejects, and which 
accordingly constitutes the devil, is all taken up, 
and becomes the guarantee of an endless Divine 
glorification on earth infinitely transcending 
everything known in heaven. This is the great 
arcanum which underlies the truth of Christ's 
resurrection and ascension, or the glorification 
of his natural body down to its flesh and bones. 
Handle me and see, he said to his stupefied disci- 
ples who fancied that they saw a spirit : a spirit 
hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have. Un- 
like the mere good man or angel he excluded 
no affection which inflowed to him either from 
the universal heaven or the universal hell. On 
the contrary he received all and converted all 
into a worthy triumph of the Divine Love, by 
turning the evil affections into the spontaneous 
subjection of the good affections, or making hell 



2 50 Influence of the Christian Truth 

itself the willing and cordial servitor of heaven: 
so that the very flesh and bones which he had 
derived from his mother, and which ordinary 
men leave in the grave, that base flesh and bones 
which connected him in sympathy with the en- 
tire finite realm of being angelic and diabolic, 
became really or spiritually his own, became so 
transformed by the purifying fires of his soul 
into the image of his inmost Divine and infinite 
innocence, as to avouch themselves at length its 
every way adequate instrument, its befitting and 
inseparable tabernacle to eternity. 

The priceless value of the Christian truth is, 
that it thus reveals God to us as a glorified nat- 
ural man, and consequently makes any amount 
of hope for this despised and degraded natural 
body of ours, for its growth in all health and 
beauty and dazzling innocence not only possible, 
but a strict religious delight and obligation. 
Can any one really be so foolish as to suppose 
that God can worthily provide for the soul, 
without first providing for that matchless taber- 
nacle in which it resides : that He can insure us 
an endless spiritual or private individual devel- 
opment, without first freeing our natural or com- 
mon life from those disorders which have hith- 
erto borne it down to the earth ? Well, this is 
the precise marvel wrapped up in the truth of 
Christ's resurrection from death in his natural 
body ; namely : the reduction of human nature 
itself to order, so that our hitherto neglected 
body shall become the only visible and acknowl- 
edged temple of God, lustrous with all inward 



m the Natural plane of the Mind. 251 

vigor and outward beauty, the shrine of every 
chaste and generous and ennobling offering. 

However much then we may esteem the an- 
gel, and aspire to emulate him in spiritual things, 
we are bound also by our superior reverence for 
the angel's Lord, not to omit the devil either 
from our most hopeful regard. The devil has 
hitherto had the most niggardly appreciation at 
our hands, because in our ignorance of God's 
stupendous designs of mercy on earth, or of His 
creative achievements in human nature, we have 
supposed the devil to be an utter outcast of His 
providence, a purely irrational quantity ; nor 
ever dreamed that it lay within the purpose and 
resources of the Divine Love to bind him to its 
own perfect allegiance. Yet so it is neverthe- 
less. He has been from the beginning our only 
heaven-appointed churchman and statesman, the 
very man of men for doing all that showy work 
of the world, namely persuading, preaching, ca- 
joling, governing, which is requisite to be done, 
and which is fitly paid by the honors and emol- 
uments of the world. In our ignorant contempt 
of the devil we have insisted upon making the 
angel do this incongruous work ; never suspect- 
ing that we were thus doing our best to promote 
his and our joint and equal discontent. The 
angel is the worst possible ecclesiastic or politi- 
cian, because being of all things a man of an 
internal quality, public life is sure to disgust 
him : and disgust is a poor preparation for duty. 
No man of truly angelic possibilities is ever 
greatly up to the demands of the actual life. If 



252 In Divine Order the first 

such a man manages to avoid stealing, or doing 
other palpable mischief, it is as much as we may 
reasonably ask of him. But put him in a post 
of eminence or of large responsibility, and he 
will be sure to go on blundering at such a rate, 
and putting things to such confusion by his 
most unseasonable simplicity and good nature, 
by his most unreasonable confidence in exactly 
the least deserving and most designing persons, 
that you are forced erelong to send to Wall Street 
for some remorseless financier to straighten his 
accounts, and save the world from bankruptcy. 

The devil is the born prince of this world, 
and a capital one he is, if we would let the Di- 
vine Wisdom have its way with him, which is 
not to ignore him, as our foolish sentimental- 
ists prescribe, but to utilize him to the utmost : 
which He does by giving him the best places in 
the world, all the delights, all the honors and re- 
wards of sense, that so he may put forth his 
marvellous fecundity of invention and produc- 
tion to deserve and secure them. This is what 
the Divine Providence has always sought to 
compass from the beginning, namely : to manu- 
mit the devil, or bind him by his own lusts ex- 
clusively, which are the love of self and the 
love of the world, to the joyous eternal alle- 
giance of man. We, sage philosophers that we 
are, have done our futile best to hinder the Di- 
vine ways by always thrusting the most incon- 
gruous and incompetent people into public af- 
fairs ; and have consequently got the whole 
theory of administration so sophisticated, as 



is last, and the last first. 253 

greatly to embarrass the right incumbent when 
he does arrive, and set him half the time talking 
the most irrelevant piety, instead of doing the 
sharp and satisfactory work which he is all the 
while providentially itching to do. What sort 
of a pope would Fenelon have made ? And 
how would political interests thrive with the 
apostle John at the head of affairs ? I confess 
for my part I would bestow my vote in prefer- 
ence upon General Jackson or Louis Napoleon 
any day, simply because they are as I presume 
very inferior men spiritually, and therefore in- 
comparably better qualified for ruling other men, 
which is spiritually the lowest or least human 
of vocations. 1 

Let not my reader misconceive me. I have 
not the slightest idea of hell as a transitory im- 
plication of human destiny, as an exhausted ele- 
ment of human progress. On the contrary I 
conceive that the vital needs of human freedom 
exact its eternal perpetuity. I admit, nay I 
insist, that the devil is fast becoming and will 
one day be a perfect gentleman ; that he will 
wholly unlearn his nasty tricks of vice and crime, 

1 I wish very much by the way its backbone, and human thought 
that our Unitarian and Univer- would again recover its tonic 
salist philosophers would take a quality, and we should all get 
look in this direction, and give deliverance from that puerile Pan- 
up their sentimental shrieking at theistic gabble which is fast stran- 
the devil regarded as a vital el- gling the higher faculties of the 
ement of human consciousness, mind under the grasp of an all- 
Because in that case our insane devouring Imagination, and in 
and inane Transcendentalism, comparison with which as it 
against which the prevalent so- seems to me unmitigated Athe- 
called Spiritualism is a maudlin ism would be manly sincere and 
protest and reaction, would fail of evangelical. 



254 Hell glorified in conventional, 

and become a model of sound morality, infusing 
an unwonted energy into the police department, 
and inflating public worship with an unprece- 
dented pomp and magnificence. Otherwise of 
course I could not imagine why our Lord and 
Saviour with a full knowledge of the character 
and tendencies of Judas Iscariot yet chose him 
into the number of the sacred twelve, and in- 
trusted him with the provision of his and their 
material welfare. But the gentleman is infinitely 
short of the man ; and however gentlemanly the 
devil will infallibly grow, there he will stop; 
and leave the sacred heights of manhood unat- 
tempted. 

The gentleman is the apotheosis or glorified 
form of the devil ; while man is the apotheosis 
or glorified form of the angel : the former obey- 
ing a purely natural inspiration, the latter a 
purely spiritual one. The gentleman always 
acts with the most studious and unfaltering cour- 
tesy, with a faultless regard to what is conven- 
tionally due to others ; herein indeed very often 
putting the more richly but less showily endowed 
man to the blush. But his action obeys a purely 
natural impulse, having no higher spring than 
that sentiment of fellowship which relates him 
to his kind, and forbids him under penalty of 
forfeiting his self-respect, or wounding his self- 
love, to do anything even discourteous, much 
more anything injurious, to his neighbor. The 
man on the other hand is very little solicitous 
about the points of good-breeding which inter- 
est the gentleman; unless indeed you can con- 



Heaven in true, Manhood. 255 

ceive the two characters amicably blent in the 
same individuality. I cannot myself do this. 
It seems to me that the only way they can ever 
amicably combine in the same bosom, is upon 
the somewhat Hibernian condition of the one 
being strictly subjected to the needs of the other. 
The veritable man, the man who obeys a purely 
spiritual or inward inspiration, cannot be made 
to occupy himself with his merely outward ob- 
ligations of any sort, much less with the obli- 
gations of pure courtesy and good-manners. If 
he is born into a good heritage in this respect, 
if courtesy and good manners have somewhere 
got into his blood, very well : he will mechani- 
cally or instinctively reproduce them : but no 
thanks to him for the boon. In all social re- 
spects he is the undoubted inferior of the gen- 
tleman, and cannot compete for his prizes even 
if he would. It is only in inward or spiritual 
regards that he takes precedence ; not in his ac- 
tion, but only in the superior depth and purity 
of the source from which the action proceeds. 



CHAPTER XV. 

I hope I shall by this time have succeeded in 
satisfying the reader, that my criticism of the 
church is well-founded, and that Philosophy feels 
no interest in reinstating religion as a truth of 
doctrine, but only in reproducing it as a life. 
Let us now prepare accordingly to dismiss the 
negative portion of our task, and turn to the 
much more agreeable aspect it presents on its 
constructive side. 

One thing clearly results from the survey we 
have been making of the religious instinct ; and 
this is, that religion has had but one legitimate 
spiritual aim, namely : the softening of the self- 
hood or proprium which man derives from na- 
ture ; the depletion of his natural pride and 
self-seeking in order to his subsequent spiritual 
impletion with all Divine gentleness peace and 
innocence. The total function of religion wher- 
ever it has exhibited the least spiritual efficacy, 
/'. e. operated any modification of the life of its 
subject, appears to have consisted in signalizing 
to his consciousness a certain evil in his natural 
make or inheritance, which is to be overcome 
before he can attain to a conscious perfect con- 
junction with God. 

Now the reader has every right to demand of 



Nature implied in Man. 257 

me, why religion necessarily involves this purga- 
torial element : why it is, in other words, that 
every religion which abjures a sentimental basis, 
or claims to be called natural in opposition to 
artificial, instinctual in contradistinction to vol- 
untary, proceeds upon sacrifice ; figuratively sus- 
pends the purification of the worshipper's flesh 
upon " the shedding of blood " ? 

I can only answer this question worthily by 
explicating in the clearest possible manner the 
Origin of Nature ; by showing that Nature is a 
rigid involution or implication of man's spiritual 
destiny, and hence has neither the slightest power 
nor pretension beyond what our ignorance and 
superstition give it, to limit that destiny, but 
only to promote its eternal evolution and expli- 
cation. We now enjoy a better knowledge of 
spiritual laws, which are the true laws of crea- 
tion, than our predecessors enjoyed. Spiritual 
laws which are the laws of our true individual- 
ity, as natural laws are those of our phenomenal 
identity, are better understood than they were a 
century since, and it is upon these alone that I 
shall rely for the clearing up of my reader's 
doubts. I shall endeavor to show him that the 
interests of our spiritual formation in the Divine 
image exact as a basis our natural creation, and 
that whereas the folly of the past has consisted 
in ignoring this order, to the extent of making 
flesh dominate spirit, or substance form ; the 
wisdom of the future will consist in scrupulously 
acknowledging it, and holding nature conse- 
quently, or the sphere of our common life, to 
17 



258 The Church's incompetency 

the strictest, nay, to the unlimited subserviency 
of our private or spiritual aspirations. 

Viewing human history in the light which 
Revelation sheds upon it, its whole meaning 
may be thus formulated: a demonstration by 
God's providence of our native incapacity to 
act honestly from any other motive than inter- 
est ; and hence of the necessity we are all alike 
under of a spiritual extrication or redemption 
from the control of our nature, before we can 
bring forth the least ripe fruit of manly or disin- 
terested action. Our moral experience furnishes 
of course the indispensable theatre of this Di- 
vine demonstration or achievement ; because 
nature culminates in morality, comes to a head 
in man ; so that God is able to deal with it as a 
rational quantity only in the person of its repre- 
sentatives. But our moral experience is not of 
the slightest worth save as subserving this grand 
historic demonstration. It becomes a downright 
unqualified nuisance indeed the moment it ceases 
to subserve it, the moment it claims a direct Di- 
vine sanctity. 

It is her failure to discern this truth as we 
have seen which has turned the technical church 
into such a refuge of spiritual imbecility; which 
has converted professional religion into such a 
citadel of spiritual uncleanness. The church 
habitually misconceives the intrinsic subserviency 
of morality to the evolution of man's spiritual 
destiny on earth ; and by adroitly flattering his 
instinct of self-righteousness, or teaching him 
that his moral force is the direct measure of 



to interpret Revelation. 259 

God's goodness and power towards him, suc- 
ceeds in indefinitely postponing the advent of a 
scientific society among men, and consequently 
in balking all that rich promise of spontaneous 
or producrive activity which is based upon such 
advent. No doubt she outwardly professes a 
faith in the Incarnation. No doubt as against 
heretics she maintains that Christ did veritably 
constitute the entire spiritual substance of that 
typical or prophetic righteousness, which was 
Divinely guaranteed to human hope in the Jew- 
ish ritual; inasmuch as he putatively reconciled 
the human nature to the Divine in himself. But 
while thus recognizing the Divine Incarnation 
in words, she yet in spirit and truth most profli- 
gately profanes and defeats it, by ascribing to 
Christ that purely finite individuality which be- 
longed to him in the flesh, and so denying him 
the spiritual infinitude which was the only mean- 
ing of his glorification, and which stamped him 
thenceforward the sole Divine life of all on earth 
that has life. She thus consistently keeps us in 
a purely personal relation to Christ instead of a 
purely spiritual one, or exalts the moral senti- 
ment, the sentiment of our individual worth in 
God's sight to a primary place in our regard, 
while she depresses the social sentiment to a 
wholly secondary place : so giving our base in- 
stinctual egotism that Divine sanction which is 
due only to our cultivated unity or fraternity. 
Having no faintest conception of our inward 
and indissoluble nearness to God ; never so 
much as dreaming that He every moment is 



260 Theology and Philosophy only 

our sole true life, while we ourselves are but 
the semblance of that life : the church allows 
us ignorantly to grovel in the conviction that 
we are each of us life in ourselves — not mere 
circumferential phenomenal forms of life — but 
real substantial centres of life to ourselves, just 
as God is to himself. And we on our side 
are not slow to improve the lesson, or illustrate 
its practical value, by proudly insisting upon 
being treated by God not as affectionate chil- 
dren to whom everything is a boon, but as 
emancipated self-complacent Pharisees to whom 
nothing comes acceptably which does not come 
of merit. 

The theologian and philosopher so-called have 
done little hitherto but confirm us in these be- 
sotted natural prepossessions. In fact these men 
above all others foster the pride of moral- 
ism in the race, and so confirm its spiritual 
death, by systematically confounding seeming 
with being or making subjective fact the meas- 
ure of objective truth. Of course if I am ob- 
jectively or to God's regard what I am subjec- 
tively or to my own consciousness, there can be 
no hope for me ; because in that case I must 
either deem myself a saint possessing a good 
conscience towards God, and so put myself at 
an infinite inward distance from Him ; or else 
deem myself a sinner possessing an evil con- 
science, and so put myself at an infinite outward 
remove from Him. These men accept without 
any misgiving this fundamental fallacy of sense, 
that we are our own substantial life, not mere 



inflame our natural 'Pharisaism. 261 

forms or subjects of an infinite life : hence that 
we are properly separable before God into vir- 
tuous and vicious, celestial and infernal beings, 
who are respectively most worthy of his smile 
and frown. And a philosophy which admits or 
tolerates this primary misconception, is vicious 
from top to bottom. For the sole legitimate 
pretension of any philosophy, is, not to intensify 
the discord which both sense and reason, both 
faith and science, allege between infinite and 
finite, between absolute and relative ; but for- 
ever to reconcile them in a unity so perfect that 
neither will care thenceforth to know how much 
belongs to the one element, or how much to the 
other. 

The distinction of religious and profane 
among men, or of the church and the world, 
is of no account in itself, but only as symboliz- 
ing a great formative or redemptive work op- 
erated by God within the limits of our very 
nature, within the conditions of the natural 
conscience. The common sentiment in the 
church 1 implies that saint and sinner are two 
most distinct persons impossible to be blent in 
the same bosom, one emerging to the Divine 
regard and his own consciousness, only as the 
other immerses. This is a purely sensual look 
at things; for the celestial quality of the human 

1 And for that matter in the The church is wholly worldly as 

world : for these two things run to her substantial animus ; the 

together at such a rate, the church world wholly religious as to its 

having become so worldly and formal pretences or professions, 

the world so churchy, that it is a Thus it is no matter whether 

nice point to discriminate them, you say the one or the other. 



262 There is but One Life. 

bosom is determined in every case by the gen- 
uine unaffected acknowledgment its occupant 
makes of himself as a sinner; and its infernal 
quality by the genuine unaffected relish he en- 
joys of himself as a righteous person. There 
is but One life in the universe ; and consequent- 
ly all the contrasts of our experience, both 
moral and physical, all the diversities not merely 
of good and evil among men but also of pleas- 
ure and pain, together with all the varieties of 
either, owe their existence exclusively to the 
relation we practically sustain to that great Life, 
whether a positive relation or a negative one. 
For if there be but One life from which every 
man is alike enlivened, that of the infinite Cre- 
ator and Redeemer, then the unity of the crea- 
ture, which means the exact and unswerving 
equality of each with every other, is not only a 
philosophic truth to which all things in heaven 
are conformed, but must become also a scien- 
tific truth or truth of the senses, to which all 
things on earth will eventually bow. And his- 
tory is merely the working out of this great 
purpose in humanity ; the perfect spiritual au- 
thentication of that great literal revelation of 
His perfection which God makes in the Christ, 
glorifying our very nature into eternal union 
with Himself. For while our historic experi- 
ence leaves no further doubt upon the origin of 
conscience, making it to hinge upon the une- 
quivocal duality of relation we are under to 
God and our neighbor, or giving it a twofold 
aspect, one towards the infinite another towards 



The -philosophic Idea of Creation. 263 

the finite : it clearly teaches us also that these 
two aspects of conscience are bound perfectly 
to harmonize ; that we cannot be favorably re- 
lated to the Divine spirit for example save in so 
far as we are in fraternal relation to our neighbor; 
and bids us look for this great result exclusively 
to that majestic spiritual Providence which co- 
ordinates self-love with brotherly love, and both 
with universal love, in the unseen heart of the 
race, by eventually bringing forth a perfect soci- 
ety or fellowship of men upon earth. 

But let us proceed to justify all this by a sys- 
tematic investigation of what is involved, phil- 
osophically, in the idea of creation. 

It is obvious even to a superficial regard that 
creation means, on the part of the creator, the 
giving being or substance to what is intrinsically 
void of being or substance , to what in itself or 
subjectively is void of life. 

And implying thus much on the part of the 
creator, it is almost equally obvious that the 
term cannot help implying, on the part of the 
creature, form without substance, seeming with- 
out being, phenomenality without any corres- 
ponding reality. Because if the creature should 
involve his own substance as well as his own 
form, he would be uncreated : /. e. would re- 
pugn that intrinsic destitution of being or sub- 
stance which is implied in his creation, or his 
deriving being from another than himself. In 
order to the veracity of creation then, the crea- 
ture must be a purely phenomenal existence, a 
purely subjective form : in other words his sub- 



264 It is the giving inward Substance 

jectivity must alienate its own proper objectiv- 
ity, or refer it to another than himself; so con- 
fessing itself a merely conscious or finite exist- 
ence. 

Accordingly we may define creation generally 
as the giving invisible inward being or substance 
to what in-itself is a pure form or appearance 
of being. 

Does the term imply anything definite, in re- 
spect to the nature of the life or being thus 
communicated by the creator to the creature ? 

No. It merely implies that the life or being, 
thus communicated, will be proportionate in 
every case to the power that gives. The crea- 
tor can only give the life or being which he 
himself is. If he be himself a finite imperfect 
being, he can only impart a similar being to his 
creature. If on the other hand he be an infinite 
or perfect being, he will be sure to impart a sim- 
ilar infinitude or perfection to his creatures. 
Being himself infinite and eternal ; or possessing 
a life wholly above the limitations of space and 
the mutations of time, that is to say, a strictly 
spiritual life; the being or life which he gives 
his creature cannot help turning out strictly pro- 
portionate, /. e. cannot help being itself spiritual. 
In short : if the creator in question be a man, 
then inasmuch as his creature can only reflect 
his proper finiteness or imperfection, it will en- 
joy a wholly finite or imperfect existence. If 
on the other hand the creator in question be 
God, then creation (as meaning the alienation 
of His own infinite being, of His own perfect 



to what in itself is pure Form. 265 

life, or the communication of it to another than 
Himself;) of course interprets itself into a rigid 
equation of infinite and finite : /. e. announces 
itself, on God's part, as the giving infinitude or 
perfection to what is essentially finite or imper- 
fect, simply by means of the creature, on his 
part, becoming aware of his essential finiteness, 
or attaining to the consciousness of his intrinsic 
imperfection, of his proper want or destitution. 

We have now got a sufficiently comprehen- 
sive notion of what is meant by creation ; and 
this 'being the case, two observations of the deep- 
est philosophic interest will at once force them- 
selves upon the reader's attention. 

I. The first observation (which elucidates the 
genesis of consciousness) is as follows : Inas- 
much as it is logically implied in all creation 
that the thing created have an intrinsic dearth 
of life or destitution of being, which alone qual- 
ifies it for the reception of such life or being, 
so consequently this logical implication exacts 
the creature's finite embodiment, his conscious- 
ness of want, of limitation, of imperfection, as 
its own corresponding explication. For finite 
existence, which is limitation in space and time, 
alone expresses that intrinsic dearth of life which 
characterizes the creature, and alone supplies 
therefore that unchangeable basis of identity, 
upon which his individuality is suspended. Ob- 
viously unless the creature's intrinsic destitution 
become phenomenally organized to his own 
perception, he will never attain to veracious 
consciousness, and will consequently fail of that 



266 Our subjeffive History implied 

discrimination from his creator, on which the 
entire truth of his creation is grounded. What 
the creature is in-himself or essentially, must 
become phenomenally organized to his own 
experience, in order to his having any conscious- 
ness, or before he can claim that projection from 
his creator which makes existence or anything 
else predicable of him. And finite existence, 
existence in time and space, alone expresses 
what the creature is in-himself or essentially, 
namely : a form of universal destitution and 
hence of dependence upon what is not him- 
self 

For example : we say the sculptor creates the 
statue, or gives it being. But manifestly it is 
implied in this observation that marble or some 
other material exist to embody the statue, or 
give it subjective constitution. Otherwise it 
would never get that objective projection from 
its creator's brain which makes it a true creation, 
and not a mere imagination. The sculptor can- 
not even conceive the statue without an implica- 
tion of the purely subjective or constitutional 
material by means of which he is to give it 
visible existence : much less of course could 
he execute it without such implication. It is 
often loosely said that the statue exists in the 
sculptor's brain, or in idea, before it exists in 
marble. No doubt it exists potentially in the 
sculptor's brain, just as the child exists poten- 
tially in the loins of its father. But this 
potency plainly becomes converted into act- 
uality only by the intervention of the mar- 



in our objective Creation. 267 

ble in the one case, and of the mother in the 
other. 

Bodily existence, then, phenomenal subjectiv- 
ity, finite consciousness, on the part of the crea- 
ture, is philosophically implied or presupposed 
in the being which is given it by the creator : 
just as the materials of a house are implied or 
presupposed in the house itself. A house with- 
out any constitutional substance to embody it, 
or give it phenomenal and subjective identity 
with other houses, would lack all real individu- 
ality or objective distinction from other houses; 
i. e. would be no house : for subjective identity 
or community is the necessary basis of all ob- 
jective diversity or individuality. Precisely so 
an unembodied creature of God — a creature 
without existence in space and time — would 
be destitute both of sense and reason; would 
be unconscious and non-existent ; because it 
would lack that fundamental subjective identity 
with other existence which is the sole ground 
of its real or objective discrimination. 

So much for the first observation. 

II. The second observation (which is com- 
pletely fatal to Kant's conception of the reality 
of things as pertaining to the things in-them- 
selves) is as follows : If thus much be implied 
in the creation of anything, namely, that the 
thing exist in finite phenomenal form in order 
to give it conscious identity, or projection from 
its creative source : then clearly anything more 
than this becomes rigidly excluded. Because 
if in order to a thing's being created or truly 



268 Our Subjectivity necessarily 

existing, the thing should claim as Kant alleges 
not phenomenal but noumenal existence, not 
finite but infinite substance : in other words, if 
the thing should possess in-itself not subjective 
or phenomenal identity with all other things, 
but objective or infinite distinction from all 
other things, it must of course exclude all other 
things, and avouch itself essentially underived 
or uncreated. In other words still : if, as Kant 
alleges, a thing requires, in order truly to be, to 
possess in-itself infinitude or absoluteness, then 
of course everything that truly is derides the 
imputation of creation ; since what is in-itself 
infinite and absolute, is uncreated ; is, in fact, 
God. 

Now what is the philosophic moral of these 
two observations? It is that the sole realm of 
reality for man is the realm of consciousness ; 
that we have absolutely no life or being in our- 
selves which is not based primarily upon that 
natural community or identity which we share 
with all other creatures. In other words finite 
or phenomenal being is essential to the crea- 
ture, is what gives him identity to his own con- 
sciousness, or separates him from the creator : 
so that to suppose him possessing any being 
or life in-himself and apart from his kind, is 
to suppose him unconscious, non-existent, dead. 
The regulative consideration on all this topic 
is, that creation is a strictly subjective work of 
God, a work flowing from the very infinitude 
of His love, or His incapacity to love Himself, 
and hence demanding an exclusively foreign or 



devoid of its own Objeffivity. 269 

external objectivity. The work consists rigidly 
in His giving life or being — /'. e. inasmuch as 
He is Himself life or being, in His giving 
Himself — to what is not Himself, to what is 
indeed directly antagonistic to Himself. This 
being the case, the question at once arises : How 
in this state of things is it possible for the crea- 
ture himself to attain to valid selfhood, to a 
true subjectivity, to a veracious consciousness ? 
If by the strict necessity of the case the work 
of creation be a purely subjective proceeding on 
God's part, what shall hinder His subjectivity 
swallowing up or dominating that of the crea- 
ture ? Where will you fix rhe line of demar- 
cation which shall preserve the creature from 
confounding himself with the creator, which 
shall say here ends the creator, here begins the 
creature ? How in short shall the creature se- 
cure that necessary projection from his creative 
source, which alone makes creation an actual 
reality, and saves it from the obscene jaws of 
Pantheism % 

You see at a glance that the difficulty here 
alleged is fatal, if you regard the created sub- 
jectivity as possessing in-itself any objectivity: 
if you regard the creature as possessing in-him- 
self anything but a conscious life or reality. 
But if on the other hand the creature be purely 
phenomenal ; if he have no existence out of 
consciousness; if he be a mere subjective form 
or appearance to himself, without any corre- 
sponding objective substance or reality : then the 
difficulty at once vanishes, because there is noth- 



2 JO Kant refutes Creation by the 

ing here alleged to conflict with the creative 
subjectivity. So long as the creature's existence 
is confined to the realm of consciousness, the 
finite or phenomenal realm, it does not impinge 
of course upon the realm of being, or of that 
infinite and absolute reality which is God. It 
may indeed expand and expatiate in this field 
to any extent, or assert itself with ever augment- 
ing confidence and boldness, and yet incur no 
other risk than that of an ever increasing spirit- 
ual remoteness from God. 

This brief analysis of what is implied in the 
general idea of creation, will enable the reader 
to estimate the gross treachery to Philosophy, 
considered as the science of being, which is in- 
volved in Kant's atrocious figment of noumenal 
existence. Kant feigns a world of unknown 
substance with no other end than to invalidate 
human knowledge, and so undermine human 
belief in that known Divine substance to which 
unsophisticated minds universally ascribe crea- 
tion. He postulates an essentially incognizable 
and therefore dishonest world as the only real 
one, in order that that which is essentially cog- 
nizable and therefore honest may be forced to 
confess itself a cheat. He abstracts reality from 
things themselves, the only things that ever have 
existed or ever can exist, in order to bestow it 
upon a set of thankless ghosts which he calls 
" things-in-themselves," but which never have 
existed and never can exist. What Kant and 
Sir William Hamilton call "real" things, "nou- 
menal" things, or "things-in-themselves," are in 



Fiolion of noumenal Existence. 271 

truth things which involve their own substance, 
thus which are self-existent or infinite and 
hence uncreated. It would be sheerly idle then 
to predicate creatureship of " real " or " noume- 
nal " things, because in the first place we can 
never know whether or not they so much as 
exist ; and in the second place if they do exist 
they will be sure to exclude creation : since 
created things never involve their own sub- 
stance or selfhood, but on the contrary evolve 
it by diligently acknowledging what is not 
themselves. 

"Real" existence being thus summarily dis- 
posed of on the Kantian hypothesis, how fares 
it in turn with phenomenal existence ? Has the 
phenomenon any surer title to creation than the 
noumenon ? If we abandon "real" existence 
to Kant as uncreated, shall we not, a fortiori in- 
deed, be obliged to abandon phenomenal exist- 
ence to the same ruthless negation? Unques- 
tionably. For if existence be real only in so far 
as it involves its own substance, or is infinite, 
then clearly phenomenal existence in confessing 
itself finite, proclaims itself unreal ; and it would 
be folly to allege creation of what is unreal. In 
order that a thing should confess itself created, 
it must exist either consciously to itself or visi- 
bly to others ; i. e. must exhibit subjective iden- 
tity with other existence. But what Kant calls 
phenomenal existence is destitute even of this 
subjective reality, repugns all manner of identity 
whether that of consciousness to itself or visi- 
bility to others, and hence of course cannot be 



272 Sir William Hamilton hereupon 

created. The phenomenon according to Kant 
is what does not exist in-itself or subjectively, 
but only in relation to some extraneous intelli- 
gence, or objectively. The noumenon on the 
other hand is what does exist in-itself or sub- 
jectively, and therefore has no relation to any 
outlying intelligence, consequently is destitute 
of objective truth. Thus the defect of " real " 
existence in Kant's view is, that it is objectively 
unrelated or non-existent, and hence declines 
" the soft impeachment " of creation ; while that 
of phenomenal existence is, that it is subjectively 
unrelated or non-existent, and hence makes that 
impeachment sheerly ludicrous. In fine "real" 
existence has no need to be created, because it 
exists absolutely and amply " in-itself." And 
phenomenal existence has no capacity to be cre- 
ated, because it does not exist in-itself. Poor cre- 
ation accordingly is left shivering for a customer ; 
perishes miserably between one set of subjects 
who are too rich to need its services, and another 
set who are too poor to purchase them : and this 
mousing owl of science has been fluttering and 
'fooling all our intellectual dove-cotes ever since, 
as the lordly eagle of Philosophy ! 

Or to express the result more succinctly. "Real" 
things, considered as involving their own sub- 
stance, do not exist, being prevented doing so 
by their very reality. And phenomenal things, 
being by this definition unreal, are only the more 
forcibly forbidden to exist by their own unreality. 
For if we cannot admit " real " things to exist, 
it would be highly indecorous to admit " unreal" 



degrades Philosophy into Snivel. 273 

ones to that distinction ; unless indeed we wish 
to prove creation itself a sham. In either case 
alike then we get rid of existence, and hence of 
creation, as an " imbecility " of the uncultivated 
understanding ; and become qualified at last with 
Sir William Hamilton to turn Philosophy her- 
self as the voucher of creation, into a snivelling 
idiot whining over " doubt as the beginning and 
end of knowledge." 



1% 



CHAPTER XVI. 

The least attention to the foregoing criticism 
will show, that Kant's philosophic weakness lay- 
in his habitually confounding that which consti- 
tutes a thing or gives it identity, with that which 
creates it or gives it individuality. He invari- 
ably confounded the subjective constitution of 
existence, or what gives it phenomenal con- 
sciousness, with its objective reality, or what 
gives it spiritual and unconscious being. Surely 
my body, though it constitute me to my own 
perception, though it give me identity or render 
me conscious, is not what creates me, or gives 
me absolute individuality, that is, being irre- 
spective of my consciousness. A neutral salt in 
order to its own identity constitutionally in- 
volves an acid and a base. But he would be 
a sorry philosopher, though he bore the re- 
nowned name of Sir William Hamilton, who 
should thereupon allege that the acid and the 
alkali not merely constituted the salt, /. e. gave 
it body, or material identity with all other things, 
but also created it, i. e. gave it soul, or spiritual 
diversity from all other things. What gives the 
salt visible body or phenomenal identity with 
all other things, so rendering it appreciable to 
our science, is the acid and alkali involved in 



Constitution is not Character. 275 

its physical constitution. But what gives the 
salt invisible soul or absolute individuality, for- 
ever differencing it from all other things, is ex- 
clusively the power which it exerts over other 
existence, notably the power of neutralizing its 
own constitutional elements, and exalting them 
to issues to which in themselves they would be 
wholly incompetent. In like manner precisely 
what constitutes me to my own intelligence, or 
gives me conscious identity, is not merely totally 
distinct from, but is totally opposite and subor- 
dinate to, what creates me or gives me individu- 
ality, i. e. being irrespective of my conscious- 
ness. Nature flnites or fixes me, that is, gives 
me bodily identity or consciousness. God alone 
in-finites or unfixes me, by giving me spiritual 
individuality or unconscious being. In a word: 
whatsoever falls within the realm of conscious- 
ness, or is embraced within the sphere of our 
subjectivity, possesses a merely constitutional 
force, and denies itself any creative significance. 
Its total virtue lies in giving us subjective or 
conscious identity with all other existence, and 
to that extent of course in denying us objective 
diversity or individuality. 

Kant seems never to have suspected the pos- 
sibility of this discrimination. He thought that 
the reality of things was subjective as well as 
their phenomenality ; that the constitution of 
things or what gave them body, was also what 
created them or gave them soul ; that their nat- 
ural identity was one with their spiritual individ- 
uality ; that the subject indeed involved its own 



276 Kant habitually confounds 

object, having power to turn itself outside-in 
and inside-out at pleasure. He conceives that 
substance or life is created as well as form or 
appearance ; hence that no visible phenomenon 
exists which is not haunted by its invisible nou- 
menon sapping its existence, deriding its verac- 
ity, turning its life into a mockery and delusion. 
But in this judgment Kant only echoes the vul- 
garest of prejudices : exalts that prejudice indeed 
into the topmost inspiration of Philosophy. 
Every one naturally supposes (and learns other- 
wise only by virtue of a sheer intellectual cul- 
ture, giving him life out of death, light out of 
darkness) that whatsoever exists is its own dis- 
tinct substance as well as its own distinct form : 
its own finite soul as well as its own finite body: 
thus that there are as many distinct (though to 
us invisible) substances, as many finite souls, in 
the universe, as there are distinct finite forms or 
bodies : so conceiving of creation as presenting 
to God's mind the same substantial divisibility, 
the same inward finiteness and relativity, which 
our own limited consciousness confers upon it. 

This is why the popular theology, which is 
the formal application of sensuous prejudice to 
the highest themes, interprets creation not as an 
honest hearty function of the Divine subjectiv- 
ity really producing life out of death, good out 
of evil, but as an act of mere ostentatious or 
brute omnipotence on God's part, an act of pure 
magic or sleight of hand, discharging us of all 
rational or reflective admiration towards Him, 
and bringing us into the base servile attitude of 



Constitution and Creation. 277 

interested hope or fear. And this again teach- 
es us why the scientific reason in man, which 
proceeds upon the observation of a strict rela- 
tionship amongst all finite things, finds itself 
at eternal loggerheads with religion. For if the 
differences which I with my finite intelligence 
discern between Brown Jones and Robinson, 
go on ad infinitum, or find themselves authenti- 
cated by the Divine intelligence equally, it will 
be idle to seek out that common starting point 
or basis of identity which science declares they 
all have : since their contrariety is objective as 
well as subjective, substantial as well as formal ; 
a fact of being no less than of seeming ; an in- 
finite fact no less than a finite one ; absolute no 
less than relative. Brown Jones and Robinson 
are not merely disunited streams ; they claim 
also a disunited origin or source ; disavow natu- 
ral community or identity as well as spiritual 
unity or individuality ; and hence make science 
impossible and Philosophy absurd. 1 

Idealism, which is the pretension of an ideal 
or noumenal world to constitute the basis of the 
actual or phenomenal world, to give it real sub- 
stance or selfhood, has been the disease of Phi- 
losophy from Plato down to Hegel, who makes 
God himself derive existence from the Idea, or 

1 Hegel's Idealism is an at- confounds mere natural identity 

tempt to rescue science from with spiritual individuality : but 

Kant's destructive clutch, by it is clearly only a dodge, for the 

identifying being and thought, misconception is left untouched, 

It is a clever dodge of the seri- is indeed authenticated to the 

ous difficulties engendered by extent of organizing a remorse- 

the fundamental misconception less Pantheism. 
of Natural Theolcgy, which 



278 Idealism the bane of Philosophy 

confess Himself contingent upon the contrariety 
of being and not being. This alone is what 
has given Philosophy that cramp in the intes- 
tines which has forbidden her hitherto for one 
moment to stand upright or put a foot forward ; 
and which now at last under the auspices of 
German and Scotch doctors, drives her to un- 
principled and even jaunty suicide. She has 
been feeding upon wind, and her condition is 
one of chronic indigestion and atrophy. She 
believes in ghosts in short, which is the last gasp 
of intellectual imbecility ; the ghost of a sub- 
stance without any form, of a reality without 
any phenomenality, of a soul without any body: 
and her poor old eyes accordingly are bleared 
for lack of vision, and her poor old jaws agape 
for very emptiness. She has been incessantly 
haunted by this flatulent abstraction of a sub- 
stantial world apart from the phenomenal one, 
of a soul in things utterly incommensurate with 
their body. And consequently instead of re- 
garding the senses as a solid floor of knowledge 
whereupon to erect any aspiring edifice of belief 
however lofty, she has altogether rejected them 
as absolutely misleading and good-for-nothing, 
and so allowed the whole majestic heavens of 
our faith to fall through. 

Swedenborg extinguishes this shallow scio- 
lism by solidly vindicating the philosophic basis 
of creation. While these renowned pilots of 
Philosophy, by systematically ignoring the stars, 
or refusing to consult the light of Revelation, 
have managed to wreck the priceless bark they 



from Plato down to our own day. 279 

assumed to bring to port, and spill its jewelled 
freight into the sea, he has opened an endless 
pathway to her by demonstrating that the sole 
real existence — the only possible ground of 
consciousness — for the creature qua a creature, 
is phenomenal, thus scourging the conception 
of noumenal existence forever out of sight. 
He establishes beyond the possibility of rational" 
cavil, that the pretension of noumenal existence 
on the part of a creature, i. e. the pretension 
to possess existence in-himself, is absurd or 
contradictory; and so turns Philosophy from a 
suicidal chase of phantoms, into a living and 
loving recognition of the Infinite within the 
very bosom of the finite, of the Absolute within 
the very lap of the relative. He exhausts the 
philosophic realm of its ontological mummery, 
by proving phenomenal or finite existence to be 
the only existence possible to a creature ; by 
proving in other words that the creature simply 
because he is a creature, cannot have in-himself 
anything but a conscious, that is, subjective or 
phenomenal being. He must have as much as 
this, must have at least a subjective or phenome- 
nal consciousness, in order to his realizing the 
objective being he has in God. He can have 
no more than this, under penalty manifestly of 
excluding the Divine communication. This 
vindication of our natural life or selfhood as 
the fixed basis and anchorage of our subsequent 
spiritual evolution ; this positing of our natural 
identity as the sole conceivable ground of our 
subsequent unlimited spiritual expansion : con- 



280 Swedenborg puts an End 

stitutes Swedenborg's transcendent claim upon 
philosophic consideration ; the greatest service in 
my opinion ever rendered to Philosophy since the 
dawn of human intelligence. For by this one 
service he has put the veracity of our knowl- 
edge upon an inexpugnable basis, and thereby 
forever authenticated every tenderest and most 
filial hope and aspiration of the soul towards 
God. His doctrine on this subject is entitled 
to the reader's profoundest acceptance. It con- 
stitutes the actual break of day to every intelli- 
gence palsied by the darkness of Philosophy; 
the cheerful cockcrow whose inspiring note dis- 
perses every ghastly phantom of that imbecile 
administration. And I should be forever recon- 
ciled to my own poverty of wit, if it would 
only permit me to convey to the reader's under- 
standing any portion of the solid peace and re- 
creation, any portion of the generous " board 
and lodging " which, in a philosophic sense, the 
commanding truth in question habitually yields 
to mine. 

But before proceeding systematically to vindi- 
cate Swedenborg's immortal services to Philoso- 
phy, I should like on every account clearly to 
establish to the reader's apprehension the delin- 
quency of our existing Philosophy to her own 
aims. After that we shall be better able to esti- 
mate the help Swedenborg brings us. 

Incontestably the least exceptionable witness 
we can summon in all things relating to the past 
or present status of our recognized Philosophy, 
is Sir William Hamilton : and he testifies by 






to philosophic Empiricism. 281 

her inspiration that we are incapable of arriving 
at any real knowledge of truth natural or truth 
revealed. 

" Philosophy " he maintains, " if viewed as 
more than a science of the conditioned is im- 
possible. We can never in our highest gener- 
alizations rise above the finite; our knowledge 
whether of mind or matter can be nothing more 
than a knowledge of the relative manifestations 
of an existence which in itself it is our highest 
wisdom to recognize as beyond the reach of 
Philosophy." 1 "True therefore are the declara- 
tions of a pious Philosophy : a God understood 
would be no God at all ; to think that God is 
as we can think Him to be, is blasphemy. The 
last and highest consecration of all true religion 
must be an altar : to the unknown and unknow- 
able God." 2 

This darkens even the darkness of Paganism 
which inscribed the first adjective, or declared 
God unknown, but had not the intolerable pre- 
sumption to add the second, and declare Him 
also unknowable. 

" The Infinite and Absolute are only the 
names of two counter imbecilities of the hu- 
man mind, transmuted into properties of the 
nature of things; of two subjective negations 
transmuted into objective affirmations." 3 

Surely this is looking the enemy very full in 
the face. But Sir William's accomplished dis- 

1 Discussions, page 15. also the Lectures on Metaphysics ', 

2 Ibidem. Lectures 38 and 39. 

3 Ibidem, page 21, note. See 



282 Hamilton and ManseVs 

ciple and literary executor manifests at least an 
equal pluck. In a preface to the third edition of 
his Bampton Lectures, Mr. Mansel in combat- 
ing the objection that by denying us any true 
knowledge of the infinite he destroys Revela- 
tion, says : " The objection would be pertinent 
if I had ever maintained that Revelation is or 
can be a direct manifestation of the infinite na- 
ture of God. But I have constantly maintained 
the very reverse." 

The only conceivable reverse of a direct 
manifestation of God's infinite nature is a di- 
rect manifestation of His finite nature. Ac- 
cordingly Mr. Mansel proceeds: "In Revela- 
tion as in Natural Religion, God is represented 
under finite conceptions adapted to finite minds." 
Now not to pause upon the left-handed compli- 
ment here incidentally conveyed to Revelation, 
in being made the analogue of Natural Religion, 
Mr. Mansel palpably forgets that the Christian 
Revelation stands embodied, by its own terms, 
not in any conceptions of any sort which are at 
all limitary of the Divine infinitude, but exclu- 
sively in the lineaments of a life so perfect, so 
infinite in the truest sense of the word, as ration- 
ally to avouch itself intimately one with, and 
undistinguishable from, the Divine life. The 
very head and front of the gospel of the Lord 
Jesus Christ, is, that in this crucified and risen 
man, in this suffering and as such glorified form, 
every Divine perfection is revealed in unblem- 
ished lustre, so that he who sees him sees the 
eternal Father. The pretension may be unfound- 






'Testimony to Philosophy. 283 

ed if you please : that is another question : but 
to deny that it was distinctly and persistently 
made by Christ and his apostles is very unbe- 
coming Mr. Mansel's great perspicacity. 

But this by the way. Our only aim at pres- 
ent is to get at Mr. Mansel's profuse and unsus- 
pected testimony to the growing imbecility of 
philosophic speculation. 

As a necessary consequence of the limitation 
thus put upon our faculties, according to Mr. 
Mansel, by Philosophy, " it follows," he goes on 
to allege in his third Lecture, " that an act of 
creation in the highest sense of the term, that is 
to say, an absolutely first link in the chain of 
phenomena preceded by no temporal antecedent 
is to human thought inconceivable." 

Why*? Certainly not because there is any 
real incongruity between the truth of creation, 
philosophically disengaged from sense, and our 
faculties; but simply because the view which 
Mr. Mansel here takes of creation, as a physical 
rather than a spiritual procedure of God, condi- 
tioned not upon the heart and mind of man but 
upon the laws of space and time, is itself born 
of sense exclusively, and has not yet undergone 
the chastening discipline of Philosophy. Un- 
doubtedly an act of creation as defined by Mr. 
Mansel, or as taking place in space and time, is 
incredible and inconceivable, because space and 
time being themselves laws of a finite or created 
intelligence, must of necessity fall within crea- 
tion and never outside of it. The scandal is that 
a person of Mr. Mansel's merited distinction 



284 They make it an abjefl 

should content himself with that childish con- 
ception of creation, and piously stultify both 
himself and his readers by pretending that what 
is intrinsically out of all relation to our facul- 
ties may yet be believed by them: or that what 
is inconceivable may still be credible. 

" In religion " proceeds Mr. Mansel, " in mor- 
als, in our daily business, in the care of our lives, 
in the exercise of our senses, the rules which guide 
our practice cannot be reduced to principles which 
satisfy our reason." 1 In other words it is the 
dictate of the most enlightened Philosophy that 
an internecine quarrel exists between our life and 
our understanding, between our heart and our 
head. Was ever before so palsying a conviction 
arrived at with so little apparent paralysis either 
to heart or head, with so little disturbance to the 
jocund flow of life ? From the same lecture we 
learn that " it is to be expected that our apprehen- 
sion of the revealed Deity should involve myste- 
ries inscrutable and doubts insoluble by our pres- 
ent faculties;" though why a revelation expressly 
made by God himself to faculties which are also 
God-made, should be expected to deepen the 
very doubts, and darken the very obscurities it 
was intended fully to clear up, is not, to say the 
least, strikingly obvious. 

But a truce to quotation. It is clear enough 
from what we have already seen, that Philosophy 
in thus dishonoring her own function is obstinate- 
ly bent on suicide, and that unless the mania be 
promptly arrested at its source we shall soon be 

1 Lecture V. 






Scepticism, relieved by Cant. 28 



) 



called upon to furnish her with a tombstone and 
epitaph. Whence then does the mania come? It 
originates avowedly in the Kantian contribution 
to Philosophy : and a critical glance in that di- 
rection will help us to see not only how greatly 
this famous Immanuel Kant betrayed the Chris- 
tian promise of his name in attempting to unset- 
tle the foundations of human belief, but also 
how unworthily Sir William Hamilton and (es- 
pecially) Mr. Mansel have acted in devoting 
their shining abilities not to the exposure and 
correction of that foolish work, but to its per- 
petuation and extension. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

The important addition which Kant made to 
Philosophy consists in a new analysis of knowl- 
edge, which gives its subjective element as he 
conceives it, the decided primacy of what he 
calls its objective element. The old Philosophy 
erred in his estimation by allowing the matter 
of knowledge as constituted by the various 
things we are said to know, to preponderate 
over its form as constituted by our sensibility 
and intelligence. And by exactly reversing this 
order he thought he had succeeded in rectifying 
metaphysics, and earning the name of a philo- 
sophic Copernicus. The name is singularly ill- 
adjusted however, since Kant's rectification of 
the old metaphysics consists in making us the 
centre of intellectual movement and all other 
things circumferential to us ; while the rectifica- 
tion which Copernicus operated in the popular 
astronomy altogether consisted in placing us in 
the circumference of physical motion, and re- 
moving its focus to the greatest possible distance 
from us. This is Kant's initial blunder, his un- 
pardonable sin to Philosophy, that like a geogra- 
pher who confounds the mouth of a river with 
its source he makes our knowledge take its rise 
in us as well as issue from us, and hence denies 






Kant's Analysis of Knowledge. 287 

it any absolute validity. Ever since his time 
accordingly Philosophy has been playing such 
fantastic tricks before high heaven, here deifying 
all things, there denying any Deity, as to degrade 
herself to the level of a common brawler, unfit 
any longer to occupy attention. 

But let us look more closely at the matter in 
hand. 

" All knowledge is a product of two factors, 
a knowing subject, and an external world. Of 
these two factors the latter furnishes our knowl- 
edge with experience as the matter, and the for- 
mer with the conceptions of the understanding 
as the form, through which a connected knowl- 
edge — or synthesis of our perceptions in a whole 
of experience — first becomes possible. If there 
were no external world, then there would be no 
phenomena ; if there were no understanding, 
then these phenomena which are infinitely mani- 
fold would never be brought into the unity of a 
notion, and then no experience were possible. 
Thus while intuitions without conceptions are 
blind, and conceptions without intuitions are 
empty, knowledge is a union of the two, since 
it requires that the form of the conception should 
be filled with the matter of experience, and that 
the matter of experience should be apprehended 
in the net of the understanding's conceptions." 1 

We have not yet got the entire corpus deliffi 
under our view, but let us pause here to estab- 
lish a few preliminary considerations, which go to 

1 I quote from Schwegler's of Philosophy, translated by Ju- 
excellent manual of The History lius H. Seelye, pp. 230, 231. 



288 He makes it a FaEi of Constitution, 

prove this elaborate pedantry a pure superfluity, 
so far as the fact of knowledge is concerned. 

Doubtless the foregoing analysis does convey 
a sort of general predicament of the great fact 
of knowledge; such a predicament as you put 
a coat in, logically, when you mention a tailor 
and a piece of cloth. Every coat of course 
logically pre-dicates a tailor and a piece of cloth, 
but you convey a very inadequate notion of the 
actual garment by enumerating these purely con- 
stitutional elements of it. I utterly refuse to 
conceive the coat upon such niggardly terms. I 
am free to admit that the tailor and the cloth are 
necessary data of the coat, are logically implied 
in its constitution : but this sort of knowledge 
is purely scientific as interesting only the tailor 
and manufacturer, and not philosophic as inter- 
esting all mankind. As a philosopher I am not 
concerned to ask what gives the garment phe- 
nomenality, but only what gives it being. In 
other words I do not ask what makes the gar- 
ment, i. e. what elements enter into its material 
constitution; but only what creates it or gives it 
absolute existence. The coat itself or spiritual- 
ly, i. e. in the use or power it exerts, is some- 
thing very different and superior to the material 
elements which go to constitute it : it indeed 
involves (or presupposes) these elements, and 
can therefore never be involved in them. The 
coat when truly conceived, when conceived as a 
finished garment, causes both the tailor and the 
piece of cloth to disappear in the bosom of its 
own unity or individuality, whence they never 



so denying it all Spirituality. 289 

reappear till the coat itself disappears or falls to 
pieces. The tailor and the cloth furnish an un- 
exceptionable material parentage to the coat ; 
they combine to give it visible existence or em- 
bodiment, so that no coat could ever appear 
without the sartorial art on the one side to give 
it soul or paternity, and a tegumentary tissue on 
the other to give it body or maternity. But 
obviously the coat is not merely a visible exist- 
ence, it possesses also an invisible or spiritual 
being in that distinctive use or power which it 
exerts over other existence, and which accord- 
ingly constitutes its true individuality, its dis- 
tinctive personality or discrimination from all 
other things. 

Now the philosopher I repeat is concerned 
only with this invisible spiritual substance of the 
coat, this absolute individuality of it, which 
alone ordains its visible constitution, and makes 
it comprehend within itself both tailor and 
clothier. The coat itself is neither the tailor 
who makes it, nor the cloth out of which it is 
made; though both of these things are prerequi- 
sites of its phenomenal apparition : neither is it 
any conceivable combination of the two which 
yet leaves them reciprocally discernible ; since 
every coat in proportion to its desert of its name, 
makes you forget both tailor and cloth, and 
never recalls them to mind until it ceases to be 
itself, /. e. until its merely constitutional side 
comes uppermost again by the garment itself 
falling into decrepitude and decay. The invisi- 
ble substance of the coat which is its use, is 



290 Science asks what constitutes — 

what alone gives it unity or individuality ; is 
what alone creates it, i. e. gives it true being, or 
causes it to exist not only to our perception or 
relatively, but also in itself or absolutely. The 
constitutional elements of the coat, which are 
the tailor and the piece of cloth, are equally 
implicated in a thousand other existences, and 
do not therefore contribute to the coat that ele- 
ment of individuality, without which it would 
not be a coat, but might be a pair of trousers 
or anything else having like constitutional iden- 
tity. This element is purely spiritual, consist- 
ing in the distinctive use the coat fulfils, the 
characteristic service it renders to other exist- 
ence, a use or service which never meets the 
eye, but certainly is not therefore the less but all 
the more spiritually discernible. It is thus the 
use of the coat exclusively which gives it in- 
visible being, or spiritually creates it ; and 
hence infallibly prescribes that material consti- 
tution by which it exists visibly to us. 

This spiritual side of existence then, this ab- 
solute or creative aspect of it, which includes 
in itself and accounts for the entire lower world 
of its relative or phenomenal existence, is what 
alone interests Philosophy : and this unhappily 
is what Kant and especially Sir William Ham- 
ilton are treacherous to. Philosophy is not a 
search into the material constitution of things, 
into what is purely phenomenal and relative 
in existence. This is the exclusive domain 
of science. Philosophy seeks to know only 
what is essential to things, demands to know 



Philosophy, what creates — Existence? 291 

what is that living or substantial reality which 
invariably determines their material constitution, 
and forbids it to be different from what it actu- 
ally is. It takes the existing constitution of 
things as determined by science for granted ; 
and then demands what it is which alone con- 
fers this fixed constitution upon things, which 
makes them precisely what they are, and forbids 
them ever to be otherwise. That is to say, it 
asks what is the creative substance under all this 
conflict of appearances, what its most intimate 
verity, what its fundamental raison d'etre, Kant 
on the contrary degrades Philosophy to the 
level of Science by identifying the spiritual 
essence of things with their sensuous constitu- 
tion, so turning Philosophy from an inquiry 
into the absolute being of things, to an investi- 
gation of their phenomenal existence. He 
makes it an analysis primarily of the constitu- 
tion of existence ; and as he finds there no trace 
of being, no evidence of creation, no sign of 
life or infinitude, - he at once declares that Phi- 
losophy is an incompetent witness to these truths, 
and devolves its burden upon the moral instinct. 
Every fact of life or consciousness doubtless, 
like every fact of experience, involves a consti- 
tutional side which gives it identity with all 
other existence, and adapts it to our capacity of 
sensuous recognition. But you give a mon- 
strously false notion of the living fact, if you 
attempt to run it into these sensuous condi- 
tions. Knowledge does indeed always pre-sup- 
pose on its constitutional side, does always pred- 



292 Science deals with the Relative, 

icate in other words to the understanding of a 
looker-on, a thing knowing and a thing known. 
But the precise miracle of the living fact — the 
very life of the conscious experience — is, that 
it utterly obliterates the discrimination which 
sense alleges between these elements, and blends 
or fuses them in its own unitary and absolute 
individuality. Life or consciousness always 
unites what mere existence or sense disunites; 
so that to attempt reproducing the living expe- 
rience called knowledge, by alleging its purely 
constitutional elements or simples, would be like 
attempting to convey an image of a trunk by 
enumerating its contents, or to give an idea of 
marriage by evoking the lineaments of a mourn- 
ing bride and a bereaved husband. As marriage 
is nothing if it be not indissoluble, as it confesses 
itself instantly falsified by whatsoever impedes 
the essential unity of the parties to it, so every 
fact of life or consciousness supposes a complete 
fusion of man and nature, supposes a marriage 
between them so real and vital as to make any 
subsequent divorce, such as Kant alleges in his 
discrimination of subject and object, of the me 
and the not-me, utterly futile and impracticable. 
Yet the whole current Philosophy of Percep- 
tion is built upon this shallow fallacy of obser- 
vation, upon this profoundly vicious and incom- 
petent estimate of the fact in hand ; and no 
rectification of it is possible therefore unless we 
clearly understand ourselves here. 

What we have already seen is, that science is 
a research into the physical constitution of things, 



Philosophy with the Absolute. 293 

into whatsoever gives them visible body or ex- 
istence, and so relates them to our intelligence ; 
while Philosophy is a research exclusively into 
the spiritual essence of things, into whatsoever 
gives them invisible being, or stamps their ex- 
istence absolute and independent of our intelli- 
gence. Science guards the natural pedigree of 
existence ; Philosophy takes all that labor for 
granted, and cares only to assert the spiritual 
essence of the existence thus generated. Now 
what we are about to scrutinize is, the endless 
imbecility which Kant has fathered upon Philos- 
ophy by confounding these utterly distinct fields 
of research ; that is to say, by sinking the Infi- 
nite in the finite, dissolving life in mere exist- 
ence, and running the philosopher into the 
logician. The whole subsequent evolution of 
Philosophy in Germany, starting from this initial 
blunder, has tended towards such a deadly objec- 
tifying of the me to its own consciousness, that 
Hegel or somebody else in his place was bound 
to put a climax to the speculative dotage and 
delirium of his race, by gravely proclaiming the 
identity of being and thought, or what is the 
same thing, making God to be vivified by us 
rather than us by Him. But let us begin at the 
beginning. 

Our intelligence is conversant with two orders 
of facts : 1 . facts of Life, which are known only 
from within, or by Consciousness ; 2. facts of 
Existence, which are known only from without, 
or by Sense. The rose, the horse, the moun- 
tain, the lake, the stars, the man, are facts of 



294 Faffs of Life known from within, 

existence simply, which are given in my sensi- 
ble organization, and are consequently known 
only ab extra. But the emotion of delight I 
experience when I view the lake spreading its 
smiling bosom before my window, bounded by 
the verdurous slopes of the opposite mountain, 
and reflecting now the busy industry of man, 
now the repose of the tranquil heavens, is exclu- 
sively a fact of life, shut up to my proper con- 
sciousness, or known only from within, and quite 
above the power of sense to produce or even 
adequately to report. The senses involve in 
their varied realm all the scattered particulars, 
or merely material constituents, of the land- 
scape ; but the joy I experience in seeing these 
disunited details, these disjeffa membra, melt into 
living unison, is a purely spiritual fact, denoting 
a sensibility greatly interior and superior to that 
of my. body. No doubt the animal sees — so 
far as the mere organic fact of sight is con- 
cerned — every material feature of the landscape 
just as we see it, perhaps better. But that 
which gives these things all their charm and 
meaning to us, and which is their fitness to re- 
flect a certain interior sentiment we profoundly 
feel of the spiritual unity that constitutes Life, 
and binds all existence together, this is entirely 
lacking to the animal, however superior he may 
be to us in sensible organization, and can never 
by any possibility be communicated to him. 

Try the experiment. Suppose for example 
that you lead your horse, some starry night, to 
an eminence whence an unobstructed view of 



Faffs of Existence from without, 295 

the heavens may be commanded. He will 
doubtless see the stars, see those which fall 
under the horizon of his vision, quite as accu- 
rately as you see them. But will he also look 
at them ? Will his gaze be attracted and riv- 
eted to them as yours is ? Will he feel the 
emotions of grandeur you feel, those intimations 
of a life higher than the stars, which makes 
their hoariest orbs seem indeed but of yesterday, 
and turns the overpowering galaxy itself into 
glittering tinsel ? Assuredly not. He will 
snuff and nibble the obscure herbage at his feet 
by way of pastime, and will remind you by an 
expostulatory snort, that good straw is awaiting 
him in the warm stable whence you have so 
superfluously dislodged him. But as for any 
sympathy with you, that is absurd. The horse 
sees the spectacle, it is only you who regard 
and admire it. What then is the inference? 
It is, manifestly, that his proper life is all con- 
tained and exhausted in his natural organization, 
and the experience which that enfolds ; while 
your proper life on the other hand, the distinc- 
tively human life, which is spiritual, being gar- 
nered away in the Divine depths of conscious- 
ness, only ultimates itself in Nature, and feels 
itself at best but dimly imaged, but feebly re- 
flected, in her most vital experiences. It is in 
fact always and only the infinite and ineffable 
Divine beauty which struggles to make itself 
known in these emphatic natural experiences ; 
which lets itself down so to speak in these tran- 
scendent moments to our rapt intelligence : and 



296 JVhat constitutes a thing 

in the surprise of the rich discovery, in the be- 
wilderment of such unsuspected wealth, we 
often very generously accredit Nature itself, 
which is but the stupendous mirror of the trans- 
action, with a glory not its own. 

Thus life clearly pre-supposes existence, or 
consciousness presupposes sense, just as a fin- 
ished house presupposes bricks and mortar : but 
as he would be a monstrous dolt who should be 
content to define a house by analyzing it into 
these base materials, so he who confounds life 
with existence, consciousness with sense, proves 
himself incompetent to deal with questions of 
this magnitude. As in resolving a house into 
the material elements involved in its construc- 
tion, you utterly leave out its characteristic soul 
or individuality which is its form, and which is 
no material existence whatever but a wholly 
spiritual one, being a pure derivation of the 
architectonic art, demanding all these material 
conditions for its own manifestation : so a fortiori 
when you relegate life into those facts of mere 
existence which relate it to our intelligence, you 
utterly evaporate its creative spirit, or reduce it 
to instant unconsciousness by destroying its indi- 
viduality. No one looking at a house and esti- 
mating its distinctive character or individuality, 
regards or even sees the bricks and mortar im- 
plied in its structure. These things unless the 
architect has been a noodle, are forever covered 
up from sight, only to reveal themselves again 
when the edifice shall have tumbled into dilapi- 
dation. Every house accordingly that deserves 



is never what Creates it. 297 

the name stands forth to the beholder a pure 
form of heavenly Art, beckoning onward and 
upward the sou*. 

In like manner precisely in estimating a dis- 
tinctive fact of life, you have nothing whatever 
to do with those purely constitutional conditions 
which ally it with all other facts ; your business 
lies exclusively with that thing which separates 
it from all other facts, and causes it to be itself, 
or gives it absoluteness. You may analyze ex- 
istence to its last gasp and you will never lay 
your hand upon a fact of life ; simply because 
life is in all cases a spiritual fact, being known 
only by consciousness or from within, never by 
sense or from without. It is true that before the 
horse can realize his proper life, i. e. before he 
can consciously enjoy his oats, and fling up his 
heels in the abundance of his pasturage, he must 
have a basis for it in an organized natural ex- 
istence. But you may ransack this organized 
natural existence to its primitive germ, without 
ever catching a whisper of the life the horse en- 
joys, without discerning a gleam of the horse him- 
self, in other words. In fact the deeper your analy- 
sis goes the further you get away from the living 
animal, from the realm of life or consciousness : 
for life is built only upon the intensest synthesis 
or unity of existence, and shrinks aghast therefore 
from its analysis or dissolution. So too all the 
facts of our proper life or consciousness presup- 
pose our physical organization, involving as its 
contents the universe of nature. But you may 
traverse this organization to its core, without 



298 Life implies Existence: Soul Body. 

detecting a solitary ray of Life. Life presup- 
poses organization, that is to say, it begins only 
where organization ends or is perfected ; and to 
look for it therefore among the mere contents of 
organization, or in any analysis however subtle 
of existence, would be like looking into the 
works of a watch to ascertain the time of day. 
Undoubtedly the works of a watch are all pre- 
supposed in the creative spirit of the watch, 
which is its distinctive use ; just as our physical 
organization involving in itself the universe of 
sense, is presupposed in our conscious life or 
selfhood. But what would you think of a 
droll, who, when you asked him the time of 
day, should insist upon consulting the bowels of 
his watch rather than its dial-plate % 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

The error I have just pointed out is never- 
theless the precise infatuation of the Kantian 
philosophy. You ask Kant a question of cre- 
ative substance or spirit, and he answers you by 
an analysis of constitutive surface or body. You 
ask him what creates things, or gives them abso- 
lute being irrespective of our intelligence : he 
replies by telling you what produces them to 
sense, or gives them phenomenal existence. You 
ask him to explain to you the great supernal 
mystery of selfhood or Life, and he hastens to 
plunge his foolish head in the purely subterra- 
nean fact of existence. In short you expect 
him to marshal you into the drawing-room of 
the palace, and he incontinently locks you up in 
the kitchen. We know well enough by our 
unassisted senses, and without any thanks to 
Philosophy, that the rose is one form of exist- 
ence and man another; that the lake and the 
mountain, the stars and the earth, however much 
they may afford materials to our life or conscious- 
ness, are yet not it; are sensibly most distinct from 
us. But where the philosopher might help us if 
he would; i. e. if he himself had ever previously 
been a learner; is just here, touching this majes- 
tic fact of life or consciousness, which thus oblit- 



3 00 Life or Consciousness unites 

erates in the bosom of its own unity all these 
conflicting facts of sense or existence. When 
we drink in the fragance of the rose, or the 
beauty of the morning and evening landscape, 
these facts of a divided or disunited existence 
most miraculously melt into the grander fact of 
a unitary life ; so that it becomes impossible for 
us to discriminate where in the new experience 
the rose ends and we begin, or to say how much 
of the effect is contributed by the landscape and 
how much by ourselves. The distinction which 
sense alleges between us and nature becomes 
completely wiped out in the higher fusion oper- 
ated by consciousness ; so that we feel ourselves 
expand as it were for the moment into universal 
dimensions and lap up all nature in the bosom 
of our individuality. 

Every fact of life or consciousness proceeds 
in other words upon the implication of a strictly 
conjugal tie between our sensible organization 
and the outlying world. It implies a complete 
marriage fusion or unity of these sensibly un- 
wedded atoms, man and rose, man and water, 
man and sky, man and universal nature. It is 
this standing miracle, accordingly, which you 
ask Philosophy to account for ; this superb en- 
ergy of life which compels all existence into its 
abject yet delighted subserviency. Every field 
of existence quivers with the acknowledgment 
of it. The mineral attests it in the phenomena 
of crystallization, the vegetable in the higher 
phenomena of sensation, the animal in the still 
higher ones of volition, and man in the highest 



what Sense and Reason disunite. 301 

of all, those of taste or spontaneous attraction. 
It is the power of gravitation in the mineral, of 
growth in the vegetable, of motion in the ani- 
mal, and of action in man. But it is manifestly 
one and the same power under all these diversi- 
fied modes of exhibition, since it shows them all 
concurring to one and the same end, which is 
the highest possible potentialization of the hu- 
man form, in the promotion of its endless do- 
minion over nature. You accordingly ask the 
philosopher to account for this stupendous mar- 
vel of Life, which fuses all existence in the unity 
of a beneficent spiritual end, compelling it in 
fact into the proportions of an infinitely various 
but infinitely harmonious human form. What 
does the shameless fellow thereupon do % Does 
he instantly down upon his knees in mute be- 
cause ecstatic acknowledgment of the Highest ? 
Not a bit of it. He incontinently turns his 
back upon the overwhelming spectacle, and com- 
mences grubbing away like a blear-eyed mole in 
the mud of mere existence, to prove to you that 
he there finds a solution of the great mystery 
equally disenchanting to one's child-like adora- 
tion, and elevating to one's manly self-conceit. 
Life forsooth, or consciousness, is merely subject 
and object, the me and the not-me, in eternal 
correlation ! 

Sir William Hamilton especially revels in 
this shallow identification of spiritual cause or 
substance with material form or constitution. 
He invariably confounds (in practice) the causa 
essendi of a phenomenon which is its spiritual 



302 Sir fV. Hamilton's curious 

individuality, with its causa cognoscendi which is 
its material identity ;• so swamping the creative 
spirit in the created body. In fact the special 
addition he has made to Philosophy consists of 
a new theory of the causal judgment which ut- 
terly empties it of philosophic import, by reduc- 
ing it in all cases to an expression of our scien- 
tific incapacity to recognize anything beyond 
finite existence. Undoubtedly we do not sensi- 
bly discern anything but finite existence ; but 
then finite existence is precisely that thing which 
we never feel any need to account for, which, in 
other words, never suggests the idea of cause. 
Cause is invariably suggested by the perception 
of a change which has come over the face of 
finite existence, of an interruption to its conti- 
nuity ; so that so far from the term being ever 
employed to indicate as Sir William Hamilton 
would persuade us, anything in the fixed consti- 
tution of existence, it is never so employed, be- 
ing always in use to express some new phenome- 
non of life or motion. 

For example, I come into my library and see 
my papers which I had left a short time ago in 
complete order, turned topsy-turvy. Nothing 
whatever in the constitution of things accounts 
for this. So far as the mere existence of the 
papers is concerned they would have continued 
to exist forever as I left them, until they were 
interfered with by something uncomprised in 
that existence. I am compelled accordingly to 
demand a cause for the phenomenon, which the 
phenomenon itself does not include and cannot 



Theory of the Causal Judgment. 303 

therefore reveal. This is the universal force of 
the causal judgment, to separate between life and 
mere existence, by denying spontaneity to things, 
or proving that their being is not in themselves 
but in something greatly superior to themselves. 
Never accordingly was a shabbier dereliction of 
Philosophy practised than by this emeritus pro- 
fessor, in thus violently emasculating the idea of 
cause. He has not the slightest misgiving in 
robbing the judgment of its immemorial power 
spiritually to recreate the mind by lifting it out 
of routine, or revealing the activity of something 
additional to mere existence. Comte himself 
could not have been more forward to claim an 
exact "identity of existence" between cause 
and effect, between the causatum and the causa} 
See for example in the following passage where 
he is expressly elucidating the idea of cause, 
with what a remorseless oblivion of every obli- 
gation imposed by his vocation he proceeds to 
sink the philosopher in the mere chemist. " A 
neutral salt is the product, the combination, of 
an alkali and an acid. Now considering the 
salt as an effect, what are the concurrent causes 
— the co-efficients — which constitute it what it 
is : " (to sight of course) u these are, first, the 
acid, with its affinity for the alkali; secondly, 
the alkali, with its affinity for the acid ; and 
thirdly, the translating force (perhaps the human 
hand) which made these affinities available by 

1 Discussions, pp. 609-625. place. Consult also the Lectures, 
The exposition there given is Vol. I. p. 59, and Vol. II. pp. 
too long for quotation in this 376-413. 



304 He finds the cause of a thing 

bringing the two bodies within the sphere of 
mutual attraction." 1 

This is doubtless very innocent scientific prat- 
tle, but it is very ludicrous philosophy ; and it 
will be a lasting discredit to Sir William Ham- 
ilton's critical acumen that he should have bog- 
gled at so egregious a discrimination. In the 
first place what an extraordinary example of 
causation he adduces ! Who but a philosopher 
beside-himself would ever dream of asking the 
cause of a mere fact of existence 2 Suppose 
Sir William Hamilton going into a chemist's 
shop in Edinburgh, and demanding with a grave 
face "the cause of saltpetre." Would not the 
chemist reply at once, with a smile at the sim- 
plicity of his questioner, " that the cause of salt- 
petre as a fact of existence was doubtless one 
with the cause of all other facts of existence, 
and that he, as a chemist, would be sorry to ob- 
trude so far upon the domain of Philosophy as 
to attempt teaching the philosopher himself how 
Divine that cause was: but that if as was prob- 
able by the cause of saltpetre he meant not its 
cause philosophically speaking, but only its con- 
stitution chemically speaking, he should be 
happy to inform him that it was nitric acid 54 
and potash 47.2." 

Philosophy has nothing whatever to do with 
the constitution of things or their production to 
sight, that is, with the material realm, the realm 
of organization or body; and it is science alone 
accordingly which teaches the chemist that a 

1 Lectures on Metaphysics, Vol. I. pp. 59, 60. 



always in the things own Intestines. 305 

neutral salt is the product of an acid and an 
alkali ; for the chemist is expected to supply the 
public with the commodity in question, and he 
depends upon science to tell him under what 
invariable constitutional conditions it will be 
forthcoming. Philosophy deals only with the 
essence of things, that is with the spiritual realm, 
the realm of life — of consciousness — of crea- 
tive substance in a word — where science never 
penetrates, to which indeed she is incapable of 
lifting an eye. The philosopher has no com- 
mercial ends, and he would be extremely sorry 
to consider a library of the best digested scien- 
tific information bearing upon such ends, equiv- 
alent to the feeblest lispings of Divine Philoso- 
phy. He does not as a philosopher care to 
know therefore what a neutral salt is on its 
merely generative or constitutional side ; he 
does not ask who are its father and mother, or 
what materially produces it, /. e. allies it with 
all other existence by giving it identity; but 
only what spiritually creates it, /. e. separates it 
from all other existence by giving it individual- 
ity, or endowing it with this splendid power of 
neutralizing its own material contents, of re- 
nouncing its own father and mother. 

Like every other substance in nature, this 
salt reveals a power above nature itself, the 
power of pre-determining its own natural con- 
stitution, or uniting the most opposite things 
at the sole behest of its sovereign pleasure. And 
the true philosopher laughs accordingly at his 
pseudo brother, or at the chemist, who should 



306 He thus thinks Saltpetre both 

insist upon seeing nothing in it, but a product 
or combination of natural elements. He says 
to the man of science : " You may go on com- 
bining these natural elements to all eternity, but 
unless the salt itself first prescribe the conditions 
of its manifestation, first dictate the invariable 
terms of its spiritual surrender, you will get no 
result. Now it is precisely and exclusively this 
creative or dictatorial power of the salt over its 
own constitution, which interests me as a phi- 
losopher : this spiritual or life-side of the phe- 
nomenon which, according to your own testi- 
mony, exhibits it prescribing its own material 
contents, not one atom more, not one atom less; 
so that you, when you would artificially evoke 
its presence, are bound to use that magic spell. 
Of course as a chemist you have no philosophic 
aim : that is to say, chemistry deals only with 
the material aspect of the salt, the aspect which 
it presents as a marketable product, and which 
comes to light only when its philosophic interest 
has evaporated, that is, when the living salt has 
died out under the fires of your torturing analy- 
sis. Your analysis destroys exactly what the 
philosopher values in the phenomenon, which is 
its spiritual individuality or life. It sinks the 
living personality of the salt in its own purely 
constitutional or corporeal elements, drowns the 
vital spirit in its own material body, leaving it 
only a ghostly and ghastly resuscitation in your 
formula of ' the law of definite proportions.' 
For this law is only your pedantic scientific 
homage to the great creative presence itself. 



Constituted and created by KO and NO b . 307 

When for example you announce the constitu- 
tional formula of saltpetre as nitric acid 54 and 
potash 47.2, you simply mean to say that if you 
fulfil this prescribed conjuration, the salt itself 
will appear : /. e. these servile constitutional ele- 
ments will disappear in their own creative sub- 
stance, will become glorified into a higher form 
of life, into a superior personality, than they them- 
selves have any intrinsic title to. Plainly then 
the acid and the alkali do not create the salt : at 
most they phenomenally constitute it, /. e. produce 
it to sight in a given time and place ; the acid giv- 
ing it paternity or soul, the alkali giving it ma- 
ternity or body. It is the salt on the contrary 
which creates them by exacting them as the 
invariable purchase of its own phenomenality. 
It may be said also, and to the extent of your 
interference — the extent of what Sir William 
Hamilton calls your translating hand — to cre- 
ate you as well, the humble minister of science 
who brings the elements together; since it is 
the very salt itself which furnishes you the only 
ritual capable of legitimating the nuptials." 

The conception of cause obviously differs 
from that of creation in this respect, that the 
former always presupposes existence, while the 
latter is always presupposed by it. Cause is a 
demand which is made by my intelligence in 
order to explain an otherwise inexplicable change 
which has come over the face of existence : thus 
it presupposes existence and an intelligent con- 
sciousness of existence. But creation is de- 
manded by existence itself: not by existence 



308 Cause is evoked to explain 

regarded as a changeable phenomenon, but as 
an orderly permanent quantity. 

Cause is always suggested to us by some 
breach of natural order, by some interruption to 
the observed continuity of existence. Experi- 
ence teaches us to confide in the uniformity of 
nature, in her inability to be different at one 
time from what she is at another: whenever 
therefore we see this uniformity violated, we are 
instinctively led to postulate some fact above 
nature itself, some fact of life or personality, as 
necessary to account for it. In demanding a 
cause for the supposed disorder of my manu- 
scripts, it is obviously not a fact of ordinary 
existence which prompts the demand, but ex- 
clusively a fact of disturbance to such existence. 
No new fact of existence attracts my attention, 
but only some change which has come over the 
face of the old facts. Experience affirms that 
the old facts have no power of spontaneous 
change, that they are essentially passive or de- 
void of personality; and therefore when any 
change ensues we instinctively demand a cause 
outside of the facts themselves. Causation is 
thus a direct confession of Nature's insufficiency 
to herself, a direct disclaimer of her power to 
originate any of her own phenomena : and 
hence it involves an indirect attestation to the 
spiritual substance from which all natural exist- 
ence flows. 

It was Sir William Hamilton's failure accu- 
rately to observe and accurately to discriminate 
here, which led him to his extravagant specu- 



some breach of Natural Order. 309 

lations in regard to the nature of the causal judg- 
ment, upon which nevertheless he evidently set 
a very high value. His account of the transac- 
tion is briefly this : " When aware of a new ap- 
pearance we are unable to conceive that therein 
has originated any new existence ; and are there- 
fore constrained to think that what now appears 
to us under a new form had previously an exist- 
ence under others. — We are utterly unable to 
construe it in thought as possible that the com- 
plement of existence has been either increased 
or diminished. We cannot conceive either on 
the one hand nothing becoming something, or 
on the other something becoming nothing." 1 

This recondite theory of causation has noth- 
ing to justify it but a sheer fallacy of observa- 
tion, of which any man of plain unlettered com- 
mon sense would hardly have been guilty. Sir 
William very thoughtlessly supposed that the 
realm of causal investigation was the finite 
realm, the realm of sense ; not the phenomenal 
realm, the realm of reason. He supposed in 
other words that men were in the habit of inves- 
tigating the cause of things, that is of finite ex- 
istence : that you might go for example to a 
chemist's shop and demand the cause of saltpe- 
tre (meaning thereby its chemical constituents), 
without in the least disconcerting the chemist 
or upsetting the gravity of his apprentice. The 
thing is absurd. No such actual event could 
ever occur. No one practically ever confounds 

1 Discussions, 609, 610. See Lectures 39 and 40 through- 
also Lectures on Metaphysics, out. 



310 We never ask the Cause of Things, 

cause with constitution. It is only the philoso- 
pher who is speculatively aux abois that ever finds 
himself drifting at this helpless and melancholy 
rate. In practice one never dreams of asking a 
cause for things, for fixed existence, but only 
for the observed vicissitudes to which they are 
liable. Things we suppose to be created not 
caused. Phenomena, that is, the mutations to 
which things are subject inwardly and out- 
wardly, we claim to be caused not created. 
Things have an absolute existence to sense, and 
never suggest the conception which is implied 
in all causation, that they exist for the sake of 
something else than themselves. The origin of 
things, or of finite existence, is a question of pure 
Philosophy, not of science, all whose attention 
goes to ascertaining the purely logical relations 
of unity and variety which characterize finite 
existence to our apprehension, and noting the 
purely phenomenal modifications to which its 
forms are incidentally and accidentally exposed. 
The vulgar designation of the creator as a 
cause (the First cause) is owing exclusively to 
this inveterate habit among philosophers, of 
reducing questions of pure Philosophy (such 
for example, as the origin of existence) to ques- 
tions of science, to the extent of envisaging 
creation itself at last as a mere event in space 
and time. The question of creation which is a 
question not about any event in space and time, 
but about the origin of space and time them- 
selves, is a purely philosophic question, wholly 
insoluble by any scientific acumen, and disdain- 






but only of their Mutations. 3 1 1 

ing therefore the application of the ordinary 
causal induction. 

Apart from this erroneous application of it, 
the word cause is never used but to denote 
purely phenomenal or insubstantial existence, 
existence which is not self-pronounced or abso- 
lute ; and which therefore exacts something be- 
sides itself to account for it. For example; 
seeing a man fall down in the street I ask of the 
bystanders the cause of the event, as being man- 
ifestly one which does not explain itself, and 
therefore demands some controlling external 
agency. It is not any addition to existence 
which arrests my attention; it is not any sub- 
stantive thing added to the precedent sum of 
things ; but merely an unlooked-for affection or 
change of some thing or things already in being. 
Such is the universal force of the word, to char- 
acterize evanescent or insubstantial existence, 
existence which has no substance in itself, but 
depends upon other existence. Sir William 
Hamilton's fancy accordingly that the word is 
used, not merely to account for the changes 
which finite things undergo, but also to account 
for finite things themselves, is a pure fancy ; only 
to be legitimated by such an exaggeration of the 
realm of phenomena as blots out finite existence 
altogether. 

This in fact is what Sir William does not 
hesitate to do. He maintains 1 that everything 
embraced in the realm whether of sense or rea- 

1 See his writings passim ; Metaphysics, Lectures VIII. and 
but specifically his Lectures on IX. 



312 Hamilton habitually confounds 

son is purely phenomenal ; thus that the horse I 
see is no way an absolute or substantive but a 
strictly relative existence, whose cause conse- 
quently I am bound to refer to something else. 
The absurdity of the conception becomes suffi- 
ciently obvious when you reflect, that probably 
since the world has stood no man has ever yet 
actually asked of his neighbor or himself, " the 
cause of a horse." But the fallacy upon which 
the judgment rests is equally obvious. It con- 
sists in confounding the data of reason with 
those of sense, and inferring that what is relative 
or phenomenal existence in the eyes of the for- 
mer, cannot be absolute existence in the eyes of 
the latter. 

Yet the truth is exactly and demonstrably 
contrary. To my senses the horse is and always 
will be an absolute existence, having his raison 
d'etre in himself exclusively and out of all relation 
to other existence. You may indeed convince 
me by the allegation of certain particulars not 
included in sense, that absolute as the animal 
seems to my eyes he is nevertheless in reality 
related one way or another to all existence : 
what then ? My sensible judgment is utterly 
unaffected by the conviction, and the horse 
seems now just as absolute as he did before. 
Why ? Evidently because your proof of his 
relativity addresses my reason alone or the re- 
flective understanding, which is my faculty of 
perceiving relations ; never my senses or the 
perceptive understanding, which is my faculty 
of perceiving things. And consequently the 



Finiteness with Phenomenality. 313 

horse will continue, so far as the latter are con- 
cerned, to exist absolutely, and out of all rela- 
tion to other things. Reason may transcend 
sense, no doubt; may justly refuse to be bound 
by her utterances ; but she can never alter them. 
Copernicus himselfj though the geocentric theory 
was very repugnant to his reason, nevertheless 
remained, so far as his senses were concerned, 
an unfaltering adherent of it to the end of his 
days. 

Had reason indeed the power which Sir Wil- 
liam Hamilton thus implicitly ascribes to it, of 
imposing its own oracles upon sense, or making 
sense acknowledge that to be relative or phe- 
nomenal which a moment before it felt to be 
fixed and absolute, then of course our senses 
would at once forfeit their own distinctive fac- 
ulty of discernment. That is to say, the horse 
would cease even to seem the horse, would lose 
his visible identity and merge in other exist- 
ence, if indeed formal altereity could still be 
affirmed where substantial identity was denied. 
In short to all the extent of our sensible exist- 
ence we should find chaos and ancient night fully 
restored. 

But the pretension is even ludicrously unsup- 
ported. The senses by an instinct of their proper 
conservation deny phenomenality to things, to 
whatsoever has distinctive form or body. What- 
soever has corporeal fixity or finiteness, whatso- 
ever appears to exist in independence of other 
things, as mineral vegetable or animal, and does 
not openly confess itself a mere shadow and 



314 They are as d is tin ft 

appanage of other existence, is received by sense 
with unquestioning confidence and recognized 
as absolute. We never demand a cause of such 
things. Cause is never wanted to explain sub- 
stantial but superficial existence. It is suggested 
only where we see lack of substance, i. e. where 
the change which supervenes upon existing 
things is not explained by the things themselves, 
and consequently suggests something additional 
to them. 

Let there be no obscurity on my meaning. 
Cause I say is never employed to explain new 
existence, or to account for the origin of things 
properly speaking; but solely to elucidate a 
change or perturbation which has come over the 
face of old existence. The conception of a 
new existence in nature, either positively or 
negatively, never enters into our experience of 
the causal judgment. In plain English cause is 
never summoned in practical life to account for 
any fact of orderly constitutional existence at 
all; but exclusively to explicate those observed 
vicissitudes and interruptions to which all such 
facts are liable. No one ever asks the cause of 
day or the cause of night, because these things 
belong to the fixed order of nature : but let the 
light of day become suddenly eclipsed, or the 
darkness of night irradiated by what is called 
" the northern lights," and instantly every one is 
alert to postulate a cause of the phenomenon. 
It is never any universal fact of order which 
cause is challenged to explain, but always some 
quite specific fact of disorder. Even in the 



as Sense and Reason. 315 

way of negation therefore the causal judgment 
never implies the conception of new existence, 
but at most the disintegration of old existence. 
Its evident purpose is to stamp nature with im- 
becility to our apprehension, by proving her 
most fixed order, her most absolute existences, 
subject to perturbations and mutations which 
they themselves are alike unable to explain or to 
resist. This mysterious play of life which every- 
where breaks up the even tenor of existence and 
waylays our footsteps with endless surprises, in- 
fallibly disengages the mind from nature and 
educates it to the discernment of higher things : 
since our habitual experience of nature's stabil- 
ity forbids us to attribute it to her, and binds 
us to ascribe it to some superior source. 

But let me endeavor to make all I have said 
with regard to the causal judgment clear by a 
familiar illustration. 

I come into my library some morning and 
find the clock which I had left upright in its 
place on the mantel-piece, lying now in shattered 
fragments on the floor : and I of course set my- 
self at once to explore the cause of the disaster: 
i. e. to trace out the living nexus which binds the 
precedent fact to the subsequent one ; in other 
words, accounts for the change I witness. 

Now in the first place what is the origin of 
this overpowering intellectual instinct on my 
part*? Why am I irresistibly impelled to trace 
back the change I witness to some living agency ; 
1. e. to something not given in the actual facts ? 
Why do I not accept disaster as the animal 



316 Cause is adduced to explain Fafts 

does, that is, as a simple fait accompli or matter 
of course, demanding no rational inquisition into 
its antecedents, suggesting no rational dread of 
its consequents ! Why is it that I do not acqui- 
esce in it as I acquiesce in green peas, or straw- 
berries, or any other fact of nature, and without 
this restless curiosity to get behind the event 
and ascertain what I call its cause ? 

It will not do to say that prudence, or the de- 
sire to shield myself as far as possible from sim- 
ilar costly contingencies in the future, forms the 
chief part of my motive. Prudence no doubt 
accounts very well for my purely personal and 
adventitious interest in the inquiry ; but it does 
not explain my rational or scientific curiosity in 
the premises. My rational or scientific interest 
in the investigation is urged, altogether, by the 
consideration that it is not a visible fact of sense 
or nature which arrests my attention, but a 
strictly invisible fact of relation, which therefore 
legitimately piques my scientific curiosity. A 
certain relation unintelligible to sense has sud- 
denly declared itself between two facts of exist- 
ence or nature : 1. the clock standing upright on 
the mantel-piece ; 2. the same clock lying pros- 
trate on the floor : and my scientific instinct, or 
faculty of discerning relations, at once prompts 
me to trace out the hidden link of connection 
between the two facts. Thus the reader per- 
ceives that the appeal is not at all to my senses, 
or the faculty whereby I apprehend simple ex- 
istence, but exclusively to my reason which is 
the faculty whereby I apprehend organized 



not of Sensible but of Rational Order. 3 ] 7 

composite or relative existence. In fact the 
origin of the causal judgment lies altogether in 
the necessity which the intellect of man is under, 
in order to be intellect, of separating itself from 
sense, or renouncing the latter's mastery. I feel, 
as man, a rational instinct of revolt against the 
dogmatism of sense which teaches me that every- 
thing substantially is what it formally appears ; 
thus that nature constitutes her own substance : 
and my demand of cause is the invariable signal 
of this revolt. My intellect becomes built up 
exactly in the measure of my yielding to it, or 
following it out to its last and most negative 
results ; because it becomes empowered by this 
preparatory discipline to acknowledge the con- 
summate deliverance of Philosophy ; which is, 
that as all the shifting events or phenomena of 
nature refer themselves finally to one cause, the 
finite will, so all her most fixed and absolute or 
independent existences refer themselves to one 
creator, infinite in love and wisdom. 

To apply this to the case before us : all my 
precedent experience of nature, all my observa- 
tion of the essential passivity of existence, for- 
bids me to suppose that the disaster before me 
originated spontaneously, or grew as we say out 
of the nature of things. I know with entire 
certainty that clocks have no such selfhood or 
power of originating their own activity, as would 
invest the one in question with the responsibility 
of what has befallen it, or justify me consequently 
in regarding the disaster as an absolute event, 
as an incident involved in the personality of the 



318 Causation a scientific Rudiment of 

clock. My intelligence demands a cause for the 
disaster therefore not in things intrinsic and inci- 
dental to the clock, but altogether in things ex- 
trinsic and accidental : thereby explicitly deny- 
ing that the life or power manifested belongs to 
the natural objects involved, and so far forth of 
course implicitly affirming that it acknowledges 
a truly supernatural or spiritual derivation. 

But now, in the second place, suppose the 
scientific inquest ended, and the verdict arrived 
at that the disaster proceeded from the maladresse 
of some adventurous child or awkward servant. 
Is the mind completely tranquillized by that 
verdict ? That is, are our philosophic instincts 
also perfectly appeased % By no means. Why 
not ? Because Philosophy is never content like 
science to ascertain the relative in existence, but 
goes on to demand its absolute ground. Science 
has found in the child or the housemaid that liv- 
ing link of connection she was in search of be- 
tween the clock on the shelf at one moment, 
and on the floor the next ; and retires from the 
field not a little satisfied with her own prowess. 
But Philosophy demands what unitary life it is 
that thus vivifies the varied life of nature : who 
supremely or at last it is that lives in this child 
or housemaid, rendering them capable of dis- 
turbing our repose, and damaging our property. 
Thus Philosophy does not begin to be satisfied 
with the verdict which satisfies science ; because 
no such connection is yet avouched between the 
event in question and the personality of the 
actor in it, as makes the event necessary ; or 



the philosophic idea of Creation. 319 

exhausts the fertility of cause, in suggesting the 
presence of life truly spontaneous or creative. 
I may still if I please push onward the scientific 
research of cause, by demanding what makes 
children so adventurous, and what makes house- 
maids so unhandy. It is only when all this 
preliminary rubbish has been surmounted, and 
science brings me up against some fact of will, 
some evidence of moral existence, that Philoso- 
phy becomes entitled to take matters into her 
own accomplished keeping. 

Philosophy is a demonstration of the Infinite 
in the finite, of the Absolute in the relative ; and 
so long therefore as science has not carried the 
finite and relative up to their highest term of 
evolution in moral existence, and so found a 
decisive limit to her exploration of cause, Phi- 
losophy is necessarily inoperative. If accord- 
ingly I can trace a moral connection between 
this event and the actor in it : if I can perceive 
that either the child or the servant acted with 
an intelligent foresight of the mischief to ensue, 
and what is more with a deliberate purpose 
to produce that mischief: then at last I shall 
have reached the limit of scientific inquiry, or 
touched upon what the unaided reason of man 
must always regard as absolute existence. I 
may now indeed go on to investigate the Ori- 
gin of Evil in the abstract or general : but 
in this case my procedure ceases to be scien- 
tific and becomes properly philosophic. We 
know nothing beyond sensible existence. We 
believe only in moral or rational existence. 



320 The force of the Causal Judgment 

Neither sense nor reason gives us the slightest 
intimation of spiritual existence, save in a nega- 
tive superstitious way; and consequently they 
leave the field free henceforth to Philosophy. 
Unlike science Philosophy does not regard 
moral existence as final or absolute. On the 
contrary she sees in moral existence only the 
very dense shadow or phenomenal apparition 
of spiritual existence ; and hence begins her 
inquiry after the absolute precisely where sci- 
ence leaves off inquiring. She builds her ob- 
servatory in other words upon the very tall- 
est star revealed in the heaven of science ; 
and from that superlative earth alone com- 
mences a survey of the marvels of her own 
empyrean. 

We may say then that the total positive 
force of the causal induction is mentally edu- 
cative or disciplinary : being nothing more nor 
less than a constant denial of the autonomy 
of nature, a constant affirmation of her essential 
subserviency to something above herself. It is 
the dawn of the supernatural to our perception : 
the invincible attestation of a something not 
included in mere existence but on the contrary 
including it, namely, life or personality. We 
never ask, as we have seen, the cause of any 
fact of natural order ; of day or night, of seed 
time or harvest, of mineral or vegetable, of ani- 
mal or man : for these things exist absolutely 
to our senses, being in fact the very stuff of 
which our sensuous intelligence is constituted: 
but only of some perturbation of natural order, 



is mentally Educative or Disciplinary. 321 

some fact of life or motion not included in the 
uniform tenor of existence, and therefore addi- 
tional to it. The causal inference is thus the 
very citadel of the supernatural to our experience. 
It binds us instinctively to deny nature as a 
finality, and to regard it everywhere and always 
as ministerial to something beyond itself. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

Mr. John Stuart Mill is a man in my judg- 
ment of far superior intellectual breadth to any 
of the persons I have been discussing. His 
intellect appears to me thoroughly penetrated 
and vivified by his heart; and though his opin- 
ions may reflect to some extent the defects of his 
early doctrinal training, one easily feels how- 
small a matter that is beside the profound hu- 
manity which underlies all his judgments. In 
all Mr. Mill's books one feels the man very 
much more than the author ; feels the upright 
human heart throbbing to such purpose, that he 
is certain the somewhat narrow systematic head 
will one day or other encounter the necessary 
enlargement. How can any one read that noble 
book of his upon Liberty without conceiving 
the liveliest respect and affection for the writer : 
it is so sincere, generous, and full of manly sym- 
pathy for the wants of the time. I know by 
the way nothing more touching and beautiful in 
modern literature than the homage of heart 
and understanding he there pays to the memory 
of his deceased wife, desolated shrine of the 
Lord's best intercourse with his soul. It is as 
if he had really seen while she lived the infinite 
substance shadowed in her tender and delicate 






John Mill's broad Humanity, 323 

womanly form ; and one yearns afresh in read- 
ing it for the time when — humanity being 
lifted to a higher level of life by the prevalence 
of superior social conditions — every woman 
will unaffectedly recognize herself as the priest- 
ess of a truly Divine worship, and every man 
shrink aghast consequently from offering upon 
the altar of her person the incense, now so com- 
mon, of famished appetite and mercenary lust. 

Yet even Mr. Mill evinces no discernment of 
the philosophic import of causation. He alto- 
gether omits from cause its philosophic impli- 
cation, that is, the negative basis it affords in 
our minds to the conception of creation, and 
runs it instead into a positive scientific function 
intended at most to induct us into a knowledge 
of the constitution of existence. Undoubtedly 
the research of cause leads us incidentally to in- 
vestigate the constitution of existence, and is 
thus productive of the best scientific results to 
the understanding; amounting in fact as I have 
already said to the complete enfranchisement of 
the reason, or scientific faculty, from the bond- 
age of sense. But then these scientific results 
are purely incidental to the research in question, 
and by no means avouch its true philosophic 
scope and interest. For our invariable mental 
experience is, that traverse nature as we may, or 
sift the constitution of things to the utmost, we 
yet never come upon cause as a literal tangible 
entity, but are always forced to identify the 
sphere of its operation with the sphere of 
our moral activity. We only find in other 



324 His failure to explain 

words that the sphere of cause is not physical, 
but purely mental. Philosophy alone is com- 
petent to say where and what cause is : to fill 
the conception out with its eternal substance, or 
declare what the positive reality is of which 
cause as scientifically interpreted has always 
been the unflinching but negative witness. The 
scientific recognition of cause has always been 
of this purely educative efficacy, as gradually 
leading the mind forth from the thraldom of na- 
ture, from the iron bondage of Fact, into the 
enlargement and freedom which flow from the 
presence of rational supersensual Truth. It has 
never been anything but the fruitful seminary 
or matrix of a superior philosophic idea, which 
is that of creation. It has always furnished a 
salutary half-way house to the intellect wherein 
the latter might find refreshment upon its toil- 
some pilgrimage towards absolute knowledge : 
it never pretended to provide it a home or to 
constitute the goal of its pilgrimage. At most 
it claims to be but a wayside inn, whence the 
traveller, recreated by a night's repose, is dis- 
lodged with the first streak of dawn to resume 
his staff and face again the kindling east. 

Up to this negative point then — the point 
of telling us what and where cause is not — 
science is perfectly competent. If she go be- 
yond it, and assume with Mr. Mill to tell us 
what cause positively is, and to indoctrinate us 
in its substance, she impinges on the office of 
Philosophy, and turns out on the instant a vain 
babbler. Why ? Because the contact she has 






The Instinft of Cause. 325 

with spiritual substance as we have seen is 
strictly negative or indirect, and consequently 
confers no positive qualification. In fact just 
as religion stands to the mind of the race in a 
purely generative and disciplinary relation, like 
that of the father to the child : so science bears 
a purely maternal and nutritive relation to it ; 
the one giving it soul, the other body. Religion 
gives interior quickening or soul to the mind, 
just as the father gives it to the child ; and sci- 
ence gives it outward body, as the mother gives 
outward body to the soul of the child, by build- 
ing it up of her own substance, and nourish- 
ing it with the living tides of her own breasts. 
It would be every whit as unwarrantable accord- 
ingly to conceive of religion and science creating 
the mind — conferring its rational unity or in- 
dividuality — as it would be to conceive of the 
father and mother creating the child, or confer- 
ring upon it its characteristic spiritual individ- 
uality. 

Thus in familiarizing us as she does with the 
conception and application of cause, science is to 
be viewed only as enlarging our mental horizon, 
as developing our intellectual fibre, and strength- 
ening its muscle, rather than as imparting to us 
any literal information. She brings us up to 
the very threshold of life, but she gives us no 
glimpse within its shining portals. When she 
says cause she does not pretend to acquaint us 
with any positive quantity so designated : in 
other words she does not tell us where or 
what cause substantially is, but only what and 



326 He sinks the Philosopher 

where it is not. She says : " the substance of 
that life which all existence reveals is not in 
existence itself, is not in nature ; " and hence 
by implication she drives us out of nature to 
discover it : but only by implication. Her 
exclusive field is that of organization, all whose 
fleeting phenomena she is bound to coordinate 
and harmonize under the guiding light of rea- 
son. She has no single authentic syllable to 
utter about spiritual existence. Her sole busi- 
ness in life is to assert the universal relativity 
which underlies all finite existence, thereby no 
doubt unconsciously and implicitly avouching 
the Absolute and Infinite. But if she attempt 
to deal explicitly with these latter quantities, 
she betrays her instant and vulgar incompetency, 
either: 1. by confounding them with the totality 
of space and time, which is the greatest possi- 
ble potentialization of the finite and relative ; 
or else : 2. by converting the Absolute and In- 
finite, as Sir William Hamilton with consum- 
mate assurance has attempted to do, from spir- 
itual substances in themselves and therefore valid 
intellectual cognitions on our part, into mere 
shadows of our irreversible mental imbecility. 
But what evidence do we want beyond that 
of Mr. Mill himself in order to prove that the 
scientific use of the word cause vacates it of 
philosophic import, empties it of that spiritual 
significance which it has to the common mind 
of the race, by making it so far forth as it is 
predicated strictly negatory of spiritual creation, 
and affirmative of mere natural constitution in- 



in the Man of Science. 327 

stead ? Had the fact been otherwise, would 
Mr. Mill have felt himself compelled to resort 
to the bewildered jargon of bewildered meta- 
physicians, in order to justify his own most un- 
philosophic procedure in the premises? "When, 
in this inquiry," he says, " I speak of the cause 
of any phenomenon, I do not mean a cause 
which is not itself a phenomenon ; I make no 
research into the ultimate or oncological cause 
of anything. To adopt a distinction familiar in 
the writings of the Scotch metaphysicians, es- 
pecially of Reid, the causes with which I con- 
cern myself are not efficient but physical caus- 
es." 1 

What does the mind know of these artificial- 
ities ? What does the mind know of causes 
which are " inefficient," or do nothing ? The 
mind has no conception of cause but as reveal- 
ing power, and personal power too moreover. 
And it laughs a laugh of bitter derision over 
the efforts of distressed metaphysicians to put 
off their own imbecility upon itself. Granted 
that you cannot find cause in nature, in the only 
sense in which the universal mind of man ap- 
prehends it, why not manfully acknowledge the 
fact ? For this is precisely what the mind would 
have you to do. Why go about to split cause 
up into a heap of meanings, which the unso- 
phisticated common sense of mankind utterly 
disavows : if not to shield your own incapacity 
to discover where the only true cause of things 
lies? If there is but one honest Richmond in 

1 System of Logic (Harper's reprint), p. 196. 



328 He makes the Cause constitutive 

the field, why conjure up this host of spurious 
ones, except to mislead pursuit and so secure for 
yourself a temporary reputation of success % 
" The cause then, philosophically speaking," 
says Mr. Mill, " is the sum total of the condi- 
tions positive and negative taken together ; the 
whole of the contingencies of every description 
which being realized, the consequent invariably 
follows." 1 But what a caricature of our con- 
ception of cause this is ! " The sum total of 
all the conditions positive and negative " of a 
natural effect, is all simply the universe of na- 
ture. Does Mr. Mill really believe that when 
" philosophically speaking," as he says, I ask the 
cause of any specific phenomenon, I should not 
be revolted if any one replied " the universe " ? 
How is it then that he allows his fine sense to 
be so trifled with "? 

The cause " philosophically speaking " of no 
effect in nature is to be found in its constitutional 
conditions. Comte is perfectly right so far in 
relegating cause out of nature. How should 
the research of cause educate my intellect, what 
intellectual help of any sort would it bring me, 
to know all the causes of all the effects in the 
universe, if cause had the restricted meaning 
which Mr. Mill assigns it? Such knowledge 
might furnish my memory, and be of use to me 
in the arts, I admit : but how does it empower 
my intellect to discern the absolute being of 
things, which alone is the quest of Philosophy ? 
For example, a man falls, as Mr. Mill says, from 

1 System of Logic, p. 200. 



of the Effeft ; not creative of it. 329 

a ladder. Here is a natural effect : what is the 
cause of it ? Why, replies a bystander, the 
man's foot slipped, and down he came. Aye, 
exclaims another, but what caused his foot to 
slip ? Why, replies a third person, the ladder 
stood uneven. But what, demands a fourth, 
caused the ladder to be put up in that insecure 
way *? You see each of these alleged causes 
declares itself no cause, in appealing to some- 
thing higher that lies behind it. Another by- 
stander moreover is heard to say that the main 
cause of the calamity was doubtless the man's 
own carelessness, as he had often been observed 
ascending and descending the ladder in the most 
foolhardy manner, without taking hold of the 
sides. Another insists that in addition to all 
these reputed causes, a sudden flaw of wind 
lifted the poor fellow's hat, and by thus violently 
wrenching his attention from his heels to his 
head, contrived to precipitate him to the ground. 
And so on and so on, until at last some one 
arrives greatly more pompous but not a whit 
more philosophic than the rest, and adjourns the 
debate by declaring that the man fell solely in 
obedience to the law of gravitation, which law 
accordingly is the real cause of the disaster. 

Now all these alleged causes of the phenome- 
non in question, supposing them all to ^be liter- 
ally exact, obviously add nothing to our intel- 
lectual resources, or fail to suggest any real cause 
of the disaster, inasmuch as they are all alike 
included in it, all alike given in the problem to 
be solved. They are all of them only so many 



33° Philosophy reverses this Judgment, 

more or less pronounced features, so many more 
or less remote particulars of the disaster, so 
many more or less palpable constituents of the 
man's fall; and cannot be accepted therefore as 
a philosophic explanation of it. You take for 
granted whenever a man falls down, that he is 
struck with apoplexy, or that his foot tripped or 
slipped or something of that sort, and that his 
body meanwhile was amenable to the law of 
gravitation; and if the cause of the man's fall, 
philosophically viewed, consisted in such idle 
particulars, one might know all the causes of all 
the effects in nature, and be none the wiser for 
the knowledge: but on the contrary a good 
deal poorer, inasmuch as pedantry, which is use- 
less knowledge, hinders our intellectual develop- 
ment rather than helps it. If the question of 
cause were to be exhausted by heaping up these 
trivial and insignificant particulars ; that is, by 
finding out this that and every other natural 
antecedent and coefficient of a natural effect : 
who would care to pursue it ? And how many 
myriads of years would it take to nourish the 
mind up to its proper philosophic stature, if 
these and such like scientific crumbs furnished 
its only diet? 

Cause, philosophically viewed, invariably in- 
terprets itself into creation. What the philoso- 
pher sees in our demand of cause is merely an 
intellectual instinct impelling us to feel after, if 
haply we may find, the true source of our being. 
The instinct may be duped for a long time; it 
may come to persuade itself at length as in 



giving Cause a creative efficacy. 331 

Comte Sir William Hamilton John Stuart Mill 
and other of our philosophic notabilities, that it 
is after all only seeking to know not what cre- 
ates or gives absolute being to things, but only 
what constitutes them or gives them phenome- 
nal body. But this is a temporary obscuration. 
Philosophy, like Him to whom alone it points, 
has no respect of persons. It may please these 
gentlemen to stultify themselves and their fol- 
lowers ; but they cannot stultify Philosophy. 
She sees that nothing can be more childish than 
to seek the cause (properly so called) of any 
effect upon the same level with the effect itself. 
Wisdom is never going to be wooed in that 
abject way. Nature disowns her own origi- 
nation; does not even know her own source. 
Nothing in nature exists from itself, but every- 
thing from something higher than itself. No 
natural effect ever owns a natural cause. No 
matter how trifling and inconsiderable the effect 
may be, it invariably demands a spiritual cause, 
a supernatural origin, and refuses to be dealt 
with on any lower terms. 

Thus whenever I ask as a philosopher the 
cause of any effect, I have not the least desire 
to know what constitutes it or gives it visible 
body : science tells me all about that : I simply 
seek to know what creates it or gives it invisi- 
ble spiritual being. If with Sir William Hamil- 
ton you should take some fact of existence, say 
a beaver hat, and apply the causal judgment to 
it, you would not as a philosopher seek to know 
what gives the hat mere body or visible exist- 



33 2 Cause invariably opens up 

ence : for the hatter on the one hand and the 
beaver on the other shed all the light you re- 
quire on that topic : you ask exclusively what 
gives the hat being. You as a philosopher are 
perfectly indifferent to its material constitution 
or visible existence. What you seek to dis- 
cover is its spiritual being, or that thing which 
makes its material constitution, its visible exist- 
ence, necessary. It is with you a question alto- 
gether about that invisible soul or substance of 
the hat which makes it exist in the nature of 
things, and calls for the existence of the beaver 
and the skill of the hatter in order to embody 
it. The question of cause rightly regarded 
opens up to the philosophic mind the largest 
realm of knowledge, the spiritual realm, the 
realm of soul, of use, of power ; and utterly 
disdains the merely material realm, the realm 
of body, of inertia, of death. Thus to know 
philosophically the cause of the man's fall from 
the ladder, you must look entirely away from 
this nether realm of nature, beyond the utter- 
most sweep of the law of gravitation, where 
no wind blows rude enough to jostle the jaun- 
tiest hat that ever sat upon a human head, 
and where no foot of any frolicsome Paddy 
ever fails upon any ladder which it has the least 
business to mount or dismount. In short you 
must look to the inner or spiritual world, the 
world of mind, which is the world of true 
cause, because it is the world of true life or 
being, where every man dwells positively or 
negatively in intimate and indissoluble spiritual 



the Supernatural Realm. 333 

unison with the Divine spirit, which is cease- 
lessly shaping him to the image of its own per- 
fect power and bliss. 

Let me here briefly sum up all I have discur- 
sively said upon the subject of the causal judg- 
ment, and so have done with it. 

The conception of cause is strictly ancillary 
to that of creation ; just as religion and science 
which familiarize us with the former conception, 
are themselves strictly ancillary to Philosophy 
which deals exclusively with the latter concep- 
tion. Religion and science inaugurate Philoso- 
phy : the one by affording her that sensuous 
base, the other that rational superstructure, of 
intelligence, which she herself fuses into the 
unity of a living temple, irradiated by infinite 
Goodness and Truth. Religion affirms the 
finite alone, the fixed, the unchangeable, the 
dead, as given in sense : so making the relation 
of God to the soul altogether outward and 
physical, and investing us with a responsibility 
towards Him so direct and literal as to be utterly 
crushing and death-dealing. Science affirms 
the relative alone, the unfixed or conditioned, as 
given in reason: so making God's attitude to 
the % soul moral or contingent, as determined by 
the relations we individually put ourselves under 
with respect to other men. These divided as- 
pects of one and the same verity are inflamed 
by so wholesome a reciprocal animosity, as to 
force the mind at last to demand their pacifica- 
tion in some superior third form of Truth, 
which shall exhaust them both by more than 



334 ft * s * n this point of view solely 

satisfying them both : that is, by even glorifying 
them. 

Philosophy is this superior and reconciling 
form of Truth. She neither inflames finite 
against relative, nor relative against finite; she 
affirms neither religion alone nor science alone, 
neither sense alone nor reason alone; but sense 
and reason, finite and relative, religion and sci- 
ence, both together one and indissoluble in the 
unity of a new or regenerate mind of the race. 
Philosophy dares not with religion affirm God 
alone ; nor with science dares she affirm man 
alone ; she says neither infinite by itself nor 
finite by itself; neither absolute by itself nor 
relative by itself; but both alike blent in living 
and undistinguishable unity : so practically re- 
producing the great Christian verity of the 
Lord or God-Man who alone is, and alone ex- 
plicates every fact of existence and every event 
of history. 

Now the mental judgment which we desig- 
nate causation bears to the perfected stature of 
our intelligence, which is its spiritual acknowl- 
edgment of God in human nature, a precisely 
similar relation of subserviency to that I have 
just pictured. The judgment in question in- 
volves two elements, one fixed, stationary, iden- 
tical with itself, namely, Nature : the other shift- 
ing, various, progressive, namely, History. Cause 
discriminates between these antagonist elements, 
between the fixed dead fact of things, and the 
unfixed living Truth : but it affirms neither 
against the other. It says neither finite by itself, 






that Philosophy envisages it. 335 

nor phenomenal by itself; neither death alone 
nor life alone ; but both together one and indis- 
soluble in some third term which shall placate 
them both and glorify them both in its own 
commanding universality. By this discipline 
the intellect becomes disengaged from sense, 
becomes put upon its proper feet, or quickened 
to discern that highest or universal form of life 
to which all nature and all history, or all that is 
fixed and all that is phenomenal in existence — 
all that is dead and all that is living — is alike 
ministerial and submissive. The intellect easily 
perceives this universal form both of nature and 
history to be human ; but the human form, 
though it possess in its morality a fixed basis of 
distinction from and superiority to all lower 
forms of life, is yet within that basis so infinite- 
ly diversified or individualized, as obviously to 
postulate for itself a still superior creative unity, 
a distinctively Divine substance indeed, which 
reason is all too gross to apprehend, and which 
Revelation alone consequently is competent to 
avouch. 

Of course the mere devotee of science labors 
assiduously to purge cause of this supernatural 
implication, or else to do away with it alto- 
gether. He wants nothing so much as to be 
able to account for nature on her own princi- 
ples, on grounds level, if not to sense, at least to 
reason ; and so disabuse the mind of those be- 
wildering suggestions of the Infinite and Abso- 
lute which are the stumbling blocks of science, 
because they teach it humility. And the way 



336 Men of mere Science like Hamilton 

he takes to do this, is by degrading cause from 
a strictly scientific or educative function into a 
strictly sensuous or demonstrative one, in con- 
verting it from a purely intellectual instinct in 
us, the germ of all our subsequent spiritual 
efflorescence, into a pedantic literal indication 
of the constitutional elements which enter into 
any specific phenomenon. But all this labor is 
very puny : for though it may gratify an irritable 
egotism or an audacious vanity, here and there, 
to confound life with existence — or to sink 
spiritual creation into mere natural constitution 
— by making the changes which occur in exist- 
ing things strictly incidental to the things them- 
selves rather than accidental : yet we can no 
more expect on the whole to perturb the deep 
serene sources of human belief, by thus mud- 
dling our own little derivative streams, than we 
can expect to exhaust the overhanging atmos- 
phere of its oxygen or rob the untarnished heav- 
ens of their blue, merely by fouling the air of 
our private dormitories. 

Let us now return to Kant, whose preposter- 
ous discrimination between phenomenal and 
noumenal existence, or "things as they appear" 
and " as they are in themselves," led us to this 
long and I hope not unprofitable discussion. 
The creative substance of things, what causes 
them to be or confers their noumenal quality 
upon them, inhered, Kant thought, in the things- 
themselves ; just as Sir William Hamilton con- 
ceives that the creative substance of saltpetre, or 
what makes saltpetre be, inheres in its physical 



deny Cause a Spiritual Implication. 337 

constitution : but as Kant saw no trace of crea- 
tion in nature, and as nothing in nature was willing 
to confess itself self-made, he concluded that the 
natural world was a strictly unreal one, and re- 
ferred the real one, if any such there were, to 
the untravelled and indeed undiscovered depths 
of our own extraordinary nous. 

Of course Kant is inhibited by the nature of 
the case from dogmatizing on the subject of 
noumena. He does not pretend to affirm that 
they so much as exist even. He only insists that 
the phenomenal quality of existence affords no 
guarantee of its essential quality, and forbids 
you to infer the substance of things from their 
form : but as to whether or not any such es- 
sence or substance of things anywhere actually 
exists, he will not allow himself even an opinion. 
He is like a man who disputes the title-deeds of 
an estate in the interest not only of an unknown 
but of an essentially unknowable and possibly 
altogether imaginary tenant, and without being 
too sure indeed that the estate itself exists in 
rerum naturd: all he is sure of being, that if the 
estate itself be not an imaginary quantity, and 
if there be any legitimate title to it, such title 
cannot by any possibility vest in the apparent 
incumbent. 

Don Quixote was but the faintest type of this 
" metaphysic wit;" for the Dulcinea he served, 
though she was not the lofty lady his chivalrous 
imagination painted her, was yet a veritable 
flesh and blood damsel, known and loved of 
all the fragrant kine at least whose distended 



338 Kant resolves Spiritual Being 

udders used to yield up their grateful morning 
and evening sacrifice to her tender priestly 
manipulation. But this noumenal divinity for 
whom Kant pants, and in whose honor he lays 
his logical lance in rest, is destitute of any sub- 
stance whatever, even a lying substance. She 
is not only not a decent milkmaid, she is the 
most trumpery verbal abstraction ever palmed 
by logical impudence upon human patience, 
representing no valid existence nor yet the ghost 
of such an existence, her gaunt insensate bow- 
els yearning with no maternal tenderness; her 
fleshless breasts having never heaved with one 
throb of wifely affection or maiden modesty. 

What we have already clearly seen is, the 
degradation to which Kant and his followers 
subject our knowledge in reducing it from a 
spiritual function to a physical one, by taking 
it out of the realm of consciousness or life, and 
inserting it in that of mere sense or existence. 
For example : I see a rose. Now, says Kant, 
given your organization *on the one side, and 
the rose on the other, you have in this duality 
all you can ever know of the experience cited. 
Except the experience itself: I reply. We 
have here all that we can know of the experi- 
ence by sense or even by science, but absolutely 
nothing of what is known of it by conscious- 
ness or life. The natural parentage of the ex- 
perience is given in this duality no doubt ; but 
actually nothing whatever of the living experi- 
ence itself. The whole materiality of the phe- 
nomenon, its reality to sense, is here exhibited, 






into Physical Existence. 339 

but its entire spirituality, which is its reality to 
life or consciousness, is remorselessly left out. 
You may resolve me as a corporeal or even as a 
psychical existence back into the loins of my 
father and mother ; but I have an incorporeal 
or spiritual existence as well which baffles chem- 
istry and defies all rational analysis : an exist- 
ence in myself or to consciousness which laughs 
to scorn the attribution of any finite parentage. 
No amount of exactest pedantry as to my phys- 
ical beginnings will avail to introduce you to 
this great spiritual fact of individuality, of char- 
acter, of personality in me, this fact of life or 
consciousness exclusively, which demands an 
infinite paternity, and is forever shut up to the 
unsunned privacies of my own bosom. It is 
precisely this inmost and sacredest life of knowl- 
edge, this utter spirituality of the phenomenon 
as avouched by consciousness, which Kant over- 
lays in giving you its material genesis, or stifles 
under its natural pedigree ; and its unhappy 
ghost ever after haunted his metaphysic pillow 
till he contrived to drug it by that timorous con- 
cession of the world " of things-in-themselves." 
He inventoried all the materials of the house, 
all that had been necessary to give the house 
visible existence to outside eyes : but he lisped 
no word of its living personality, i. e. of the 
myriad uses it promotes to those who inhabit 
it. In short he analyzed the dead body of 
knowledge after its living spirit had forsaken it ; 
but instead of modestly calling his analysis a 
post-mortem, he had the fatuity unpardonable in 



34° He makes the Disse£Iing~room 

a philosopher to represent it as a portrait from 
life. It was as if a man in giving you the natu- 
ral pedigree of a horse, should fancy that he had 
given you the living animal himself. No 
greater infatuation was ever exhibited, and noth- 
ing explains it but the puerile blindness which 
the cleverest men habitually betray in reference 
to the distinction between life and existence, be- 
tween truth and fact. No incident of life or 
consciousness can be sensibly discerned. We 
may so discern it in its parentage, but never in 
itself; because being in itself spiritual it can 
only be spiritually discerned, that is livingly, or 
ab intra not ab extra. We may go on accord- 
ingly to investigate the mere physical investiture 
or material husk of our living experiences till 
doomsday : we shall never by that process get 
any nearer to the spiritual substance itself, but 
only the more hopelessly away from it. 

Let us now draw a little nearer to our theme, 
and to this end let us complete our extract from 
the convenient and capable Schwegler. We 
have already been taught by Kant the parentage 
of knowledge : we have seen it to be the invari- 
able issue of a congress between an active sub- 
ject and a passive object, between a living 
mother and a dead father. Be not surprised to 
learn therefore, as you now are about to do on 
the authority of the distinguished accoucheur 
himself, that the progeny of this most ill-starred 
and unequal conjunction is in no case trustwor- 
thy, being sure in fact to turn out either an un- 
mitigated idiot or an unmitigated liar, it scarcely 



the Seminary of Philosophy. 341 

matters which, whenever you dispose yourself 
to place a serious dependence upon its word. 

" Nevertheless we do not know things as they 
are in themselves. First, because the categories 
or forms of our understanding prevent. By 
bringing that which is given as the material of 
knowledge into our conceptions as the form, 
there is manifestly a change in respect to the 
objects, which become thought of not as they 
are but only as we apprehend them : they appear 
to us only as they are transmuted into categories. 
But besides this subjective addition, there is yet 
another. We do not know things as they are 
in themselves, secondly, because even the intui- 
tions which we bring within the understanding's 
conceptions are not pure and uncolored, but are 
already penetrated by a subjective medium, /. e. 
by the universal form of all objects of sense, 
namely, space and time. — From this it follows, 
that it is only phenomena which we know and 
not things in themselves separated from space 
and time." 1 

Such, succinctly stated, was the momentous 
discovery on which Kant based his claim to be 
considered the Copernicus of a new speculative 
era. Preceding philosophers had made the 
knowing subject wear the color of the known 
object: "henceforth," said Kant, "let the object 
take the color of the subject, the thing that is 
known take the shape of that which knows." 
What has been the result to Philosophy *? She 
has gone stark staring mad in Germany, and 

1 Schwegler, ut ante. 



34 2 His pretension to be 

avoids that catastrophe in Scotland only by re- 
nouncing her function. That is to say, Kant's 
German successors, never questioning the valid- 
ity of his premises, undertook a quasi resuscita- 
tion of the object thus contemptuously swallowed 
up in the subject, by making the subject objec- 
tive to itself; /. e. they undertook to save the 
creator thus summarily merged in the creature, 
by makjng the creature himself evolve the cre- 
ator. Sir William Hamilton starting from the 
same chimerical station failed to reach the same 
crazy terminus, only by wilfully running his 
locomotive off the track ; that is, by postulating 
the radical incompetency of Philosophy to any 
doctrine whether of the subject or the object, 
whether of finite or infinite, whether of man or 
God : thus taking not merely the existence of the 
creator but that also of the philosophic creature 
himself off the terra firma of assured knowledge, 
and turning it into a question of blind faith or 
probability, a thing to be forever reasoned about, 
never to be definitively settled. Surely Coper- 
nicus would have had small reason to felicitate 
himself, could he have fancied that the seeds of 
truth he planted were going to produce a crop 
of such egregious Newtons as these ! But let 
us make all this plain to the most cursory intel- 
ligence. 

It is evident from the preceding citation, that 
the rectification which Kant brought to Philoso- 
phy consists mainly in a new coordination of 
the constitutive elements of knowledge. The 
disease of Philosophy, he thought, lay in the 



the Copernicus of Philosophy. 343 

preponderance it had hitherto allowed to the 
matter of knowledge over its form ; and he 
presumed therefore that if he could correct this 
bad habit, and teach the philosopher to regard 
the matter of knowledge as rightfully determined 
by its form, the disease would be done away, 
and Philosophy be permanently set upon its legs. 
For example : I see a rose. " Now," says Kant, 
" there are two generative elements in this per- 
ception : 1 . the seer, 2. the seen ; or you the 
subject of the perception, and the rose its object: 
and of these two elements the latter has hitherto 
regulated the former, so that men have come to 
entertain no doubt that the rose is an absolute 
existence, possessing color fragrance dimension 
etc. in itself, and quite independently of our 
perception. Yet the truth of the case is di- 
rectly the reverse of this. It is the form of our 
knowledge which rightfully regulates its matter, 
the subjective element which properly determines 
the objective element; the consequence being 
that the rose as we perceive it has no absolute 
but only a phenomenal or relative quality, abso- 
lute existence being unknown and unknowable. 
And so, forth, throughout all the range of our 
faculties sensitive and rational : we know only 
phenomena, that is to say, things colored by the 
forms of our understanding and the ideas of our 
reason : we never know noumena, that is, things 
themselves as they are in themselves, and unaf- 
fected by our subjectivity. Let Philosophy 
then concede at once that we never can have a 
sure knowledge of any existence infinite or 



344 His German and Scotch disciples. 

finite :. in a word, the search after absolute cer- 
tainty in any sphere physical or metaphysical, in 
reference either to God or man, to heaven or 
earth, is in the very nature of things illusory, 
and must be abandoned." 

The reader perceives at a glance that this was 
making a very clean thing of it, so far as. the 
vocation of Philosophy was concerned. For 
Philosophy has really no other business in life 
than to point out the Absolute in knowledge, 
/. e. to possess itself of the realm of substance, 
of that which spiritually creates or gives being 
to all these fleeting material things : and if 
therefore you can persuade the philosopher that 
so far from knowing the substance of things he 
does not even know things themselves, but only 
some fallacious semblance of things, you of 
course cover his pursuit with confusion, and 
exalt scepticism to the crown of human knowl- 
edge. Philosophy is nothing, if it be not a rec- 
ognition of the Infinite in the finite, of the 
Absolute in the relative ; and if therefore you 
eliminate the finite and the relative from knowl- 
edge, you a fortiori vacate the infinite and abso- 
lute, and so reduce Philosophy, with Fichte, 
Schelling, and Hegel, on the one hand, into 
a rabid glorification of our natural Egotism ; 
or else, with Sir William Hamilton on the 
other, into the protracted howl of man's in- 
veterate impotence and despair. All these 
men alike look upon Kant's analysis of knowl- 
edge as final, apparently without giving them- 
selves the trouble to scrutinize it : only the 



His German and Scotch disciples. 345 

three former, with that everlasting boyishness 
into which an excess of imagination betrays 
the speculative intellect of their country, un- 
happily saw in it the material for endless oceans 
of soap-suds, and began at once to amuse the 
world, in the intervals of smoking, by blowing 
out of their long tobacco-pipes a series of cap- 
tivating bubbles, each more airy and evanescent, 
each more attenuate and fantastic, than its glit- 
tering brother : while the latter obeying the 
bent of his national genius, of his more ortho- 
dox logical culture, regarded it as an unex- 
pected tribute in the intellectual sphere to the 
old Calvinistic tradition of Solifidianism, and 
at once gave himself so whining an utterance 
and a demeanor so demure and mortified, as 
could not fail to be very edifying, if they were 
not in the eyes of Philosophy exquisitely mis- 
placed and ridiculous. 

But the question is not so much about the 
consequences of Kant's speculations, as about 
their rectitude. Was he right or was he wrong ? 
This is the only question we are called to dis- 
cuss ; and I for my part do not hesitate to pro- 
fess my hearty conviction that he was consum- 
mately wrong, wrong from top to bottom, 
wrong through and through, in short all wrong. 
If now I can only succeed in imparting the 
grounds of my conviction to my reader's appre- 
hension, I shall then not only have vacated the 
entire base of that delirious Pantheistic architec- 
ture which since Kant's time and in Biblical 
phrase "has stretched out the line of confusion 



346 His German and Scotch disciples. 

and the stones of emptiness " over the whole of 
philosophic Germany, but I shall also have done 
something to indicate a realm of certainty in 
knowledge which shall be as secure to the high- 
est intellect as to the humblest, since it is com- 
pletely independent both of our wisdom and of 
our will. 1 

1 See Appendix, Note G. 



CHAPTER XX. 

I have said that Philosophy is most strictly a 
research of the Infinite in the finite, of the Abso- 
lute in the relative. It is either this, or it is 
demonstrably nothing at all ; because we know- 
only the finite and relative, and consequently 
(unless we make knowledge contradict itself, 
which is absurd) we can never know the Infinite 
and absolute save in so far as they become dis- 
closed or revealed in the finite and relative. The 
Infinite and Absolute are what we are naturally 
ignorant of, because, being by nature finite or 
relative existences, our knowledge must of 
course reflect that imperfection, and confess 
itself unable to ascend to the Perfect. Unless 
the Perfect therefore condescend to our disabil- 
ity by revealing Himself in what we already 
know, i. e. in the imperfect, we must remain 
forever excluded from His knowledge. I re- 
peat then that Philosophy is a demonstration of 
the Infinite and Absolute, not apart from the 
finite and relative, but exclusively by means of 
them. She rejects every other definition than 
this as manifestly incommensurate with her in- 
terests ; whereas this position being once made 
good to her she is put upon an inexpugnable 
basis forever. Her sole business in life is to 



34-8 The fundamental Misapprehension 

vindicate the eternal mystery of godliness, which 
is God manifest in the flesh ; or what is the 
same thing, the perfect marriage-fusion of the 
Divine and human natures in a new or regener- 
ate manhood : a business to which the purely 
religious and the purely scientific intellect are 
both alike profoundly incompetent ; the former 
from its inveterate superstition, the latter from 
its equally inveterate scepticism : the one being 
sure if unimpeded by the other to originate an 
incessant practical Pantheism ; the other an in- 
cessant practical Atheism. 

Now the fundamental incompetency of the 
Critical Philosophy avouches itself just here, in 
that it totally misapprehends this tie of recipro- 
cal amity and unity between God and Man, 
infinite and finite, absolute and relative, and 
converts it into one of reciprocal distrust and 
aversion. It construes the infinite not as the 
friend but as the impassioned enemy of the 
finite ; and postulates not merely a logical but an 
essential contrariety between the absolute and 
the relative in knowledge. Kant shows cor- 
rectly enough that all our vital experience in- 
volves or presupposes a close relationship be- 
tween our organization and the external world ; 
but he instantly forgets that this is a fact strictly 
of involution, and not of evolution - — of pre- 
supposition and no longer of supposition — and 
proceeds consequently to dogmatize upon the 
experience as if it were exhausted in that rela- 
tionship. 

The idea is simply absurd. The experience 



of the Critical Philosophy. 349 

does not begin until the relationship in question 
is fully consummated. The relationship invari- 
ably precedes the experience, is rigidly presup- 
posed by it in every case; and hence has simply 
no power whatever to determine the experience, 
but only to serve or promote it : no power ra- 
tionally to explain or elucidate it, but only to 
afford it a material platform of evolution. It 
was a dim instinct of the truth here which 
alarmed Kant: a ghastly dread lest — if the living 
experience itself should be seen in every case to 
involve an absolute quantity — Philosophy might 
suddenly and superbly authenticate both science 
and religion: that made him hurry the experience 
itself breathlessly out of sight, by seeking to 
dissolve the substantial unity it implies to con- 
sciousness in the purely superficial and structural 
diversity it yields to sense. It is as if being 
asked to define a house to your imagination, he 
should reply : so much bricks and mortar on the 
one hand, so much architect on the other : or 
being asked to describe a child he should con- 
tent himself with introducing you to its father 
and mother. Surely, you say, the house itself 
is neither the materials nor the scientific skill 
which were necessary to generate it, being 
wholly contained in the active use it promotes 
to its occupants ; and the child himself, or spir- 
itually, is utterly incapable of being resolved 
into the loins of his parents, however truly he 
may be demonstrated to have come from them 
in all corporeal and even psychical regards. Spir- 
itually he never came from them, but claims on 



35° Kant's dread of Philosophy 

the contrary an instantly Divine origin. Kant's 
replies might pass, if your questions had turned 
upon the mere material genesis of either prod- 
uct : but as this knowledge was rigidly pre- 
supposed in your inquiry, nothing being sup- 
posed unknown but the quality of the house 
itself considered as a finished structure, and of 
the child himself considered as a living person, 
they are simply puerile and irrelevant. 

Let me be perfectly understood. I repeat 
that the reason why Kant was thus persistently 
driven to blink the solar splendor of Life, and 
immerse his intelligence in the comparative 
night of mere Existence : the reason why it 
was necessary for him to render our living expe- 
rience thus preposterously exanimate by exor- 
cising from it its total individuality as ascertained 
by consciousness, before he would consent to 
account for it : is because Philosophy in his de- 
generate hands had renounced all memory of 
her true mission. A true Philosophy whenever 
confronted with this grand fact of selfhood, this 
supreme fact of life or consciousness, cannot 
help feeling herself on hallowed ground ; can- 
not help feeling herself in the presence, veiled 
it is true but still most vital, of the Infinite and 
Absolute : and it is a rare philosopher as philoso- 
phers have hitherto been estimated, who is not ut- 
terly disconcerted by the apparition. Kant at all 
events was not that philosopher. He was in fact 
less a philosopher than a man of science, his intel- 
lect being far more eminently analytic than syn- 
thetic. He lent himself with extreme good will to 



as a Voucher of Creation. 351 

the scientific demolition of religion as a doctrine; 
but he had no foresight whatever of its philosophic 
reconstruction as a life. He had no objection to 
exalt the purely negative scientific research of 
cause into a positive utterance of Philosophy ; 
but when as here he found it bringing him face 
to face with the infinitely more august because 
truly philosophic problem of creation, he felt an 
instant instinct of disaster to all those cherished 
interests of scepticism by which his intellectual 
vision was bounded, and without more ado ac- 
cordingly he gathered up his coat-tails and fled 
ignominiously to the uttermost parts of the 
earth. 

I am persuaded that it was nothing but this 
mortal dread of Philosophy as the sole authori- 
tative voucher and exponent of the Divine crea- 
tion, which, unconsciously to Kant himself 
aroused his scientific scepticism and drove him 
to interpret all our experience as a compromise 
between our subjectivity on the one hand and the 
truth of things on the other. Surely if I am will- 
ing to look upon phenomenal existence as creat- 
ed : if I am willing to perceive in it the evidence 
of a power superior to itself as alone account- 
ing for it : I shall never feel tempted to postu- 
late for it an existence more real than appears. 
If the phenomenon be a created existence, its 
phenomenal selfhood is plainly its only real 
selfhood, the only one which does not mani- 
festly belie the truth of the case. Accordingly 
it is only when I put the truth of its creation 
in doubt, or claim for it an underived existence, 



35 2 Common Sense affirms Creation. 

that I feel myself tempted to separate between 
its apparent and its real selfhood, or posit for it a 
mode of existence which is as truly repudiated 
by its own consciousness as by my intelligence. 
Thus had Kant been willing to accept the vul- 
gar hypothesis of a supernatural creation, he 
would have seen with half a glance that of no 
created thing could it be asserted with truth that 
it was its own substance as well as its own form; 
and hence he would never have organized that 
monstrous basis of disagreement between Philos- 
ophy and the common sense of mankind, which 
was afterwards in the writings of his German 
and Scotch disciples to avouch their recipro- 
cal deadly hostility, by turning Philosophy, 
whether it be regarded with the former as a 
positive doctrine, or with the latter as a purely 
negative one, into the most flagrant outrage 
upon common sense ever planned, at all events 
ever practised, by human wit and human learn- 
ing. 

The common sense of mankind affirms with 
no misgiving that every thing we see is created 
by God, that absolutely everything which exists 
does in some infallible way confess His exclu- 
sive power. No doubt the common sense of 
the race begets very crude very superstitious 
very unworthy conceptions of this great theme, 
and as a general thing degrades the creative 
process from a purely spiritual to a purely phys- 
ical and even mechanical one. For this reason 
the philosopher has been from time immemorial 
very shy of the vulgar conclusions upon the 






Pseudo Philosophy denies it. 353 

subject : but Philosophy herself has never de- 
manded that these conclusions should be ig- 
nored, but only that the popular conceptions 
should be chastened and elevated. Least of 
all has she ever been willing to sink the idea 
of spiritual creation in the purely scientific and 
preparatory notion of material constitution. 
She equally disavows the ancient philosopher 
who sought to run creation into a scheme of 
physical order; and the modern philosopher 
who seeks to run it into one of logical order : 
because they both alike deny creation in any 
intelligible sense of the word, and so vacate 
Philosophy as a substantive vocation by at- 
tempting both alike to account for existing 
things on scientific principles, or without the 
allegation of spiritual substance. The mod- 
ern philosopher especially has drunk of the 
new wine of science till he has become fool- 
ishly inebriated and lost the remembrance of 
higher worlds ; till he is no longer ashamed in 
fact to maintain that what we popularly term 
creation and conceive of as the exhibition of 
strictly supernatural power, is in truth but the 
carnal interpretation of a profound logical ver- 
ity, which is eventually sure to come into gen- 
eral recognition by the normal progress of 
science, and without the misleading light of 
Revelation. It is this contented and inveterate 
myopy of Philosophy which turns her into the 
toothless ineffectual crone she confesses herself to 
be in the pages of Kant and Sir William Ham- 
ilton ; fit only to sit in the chimney-corner and 
23 



354 Kant utterly mistook the Truth 

doze over the golden memories of her prime, 
while the great problems of Creation Redemp- 
tion and Providence are not only left unsolved 
but are authoritatively pronounced insoluble. 
Kant indeed allows these questions a quasi phil- 
osophic interest in reducing them to so many 
unrecognized anticipations of natural order. 
But Sir William Hamilton frankly disowns 
them altogether as being completely foreign to 
the jurisdiction of Philosophy, so consigning 
us to the tender mercies of an irresponsible 
priesthood on the one hand, and of an unlim- 
ited scepticism on the other. 

But let us endeavor to be more precise. 
Kant's philosophic delinquency grew as I have 
already shown out of a defective scientific ob- 
servation, which led him to exteriorate the ob- 
jective to the subjective element in experience, 
or give the latter systematic priority and con- 
trol of the former. The fundamental antithesis 
which all thought and all action exhibit, of 
subject and object, of me and not-me, properly 
falls, not between man and nature, i. e. finite 
and finite, but between man and God, L e. 
finite and infinite. The senses do indeed au- 
thorize and validly assert this discrimination 
between man and nature : but then we must 
remember that sense regards man as a natural 
phenomenon or product exclusively, having no 
capacity to discern him in his spiritual nature 
and attributes. So far the testimony of sense 
is irrefutable. To all the extent of my phys- 
ical manhood I am properly subject to nature. 



in extenorating Objeff to Subjeft. 355 

I breathe her atmospheres, I eat of her corn and 

her oil, I drink of her wine and her milk; her 
light organizes my eye, her sounds animate my 
ear, her odors quicken my smell, her savors 
vivify my palate, her forms enliven my touch : 
in a word her various forces constitute the sole 
and total field of" my bodily sensibility and in- 
telligence, so that to all the extent of my finite 
organization I am literally built up of her sub- 
stance, and propose to myself no higher end or 
object of action because I recognize no surer 
spring nor ampler provision of life. But Phi- 
losophy rejects these natural data as furnishing 
an every way base a. id meagre estimate of true 
manhood, and proceeds at once to assign it 
worthier dimensions. Philosophy makes the 
characteristic sphere of human life to be spirit- 
ual, and is manifestly therefore in no danger of 
yielding to sense in regarding man as primarily 
a subject of nature. But science also ought to 
be above any such temptation, inasmuch as she 
herself makes morality the true characteristic of 
human nature, so endowing man with an indi- 
viduality unknown to all earth's tribes, and in- 
suring him the unlimited dominion of nature. 
She thus most distinctly reverses the order which 
sense establishes between man and nature. For 
man as a moral force renounces his obligation 
to nature, compelling her fiercest appetites and 
passions into his individual subserviency : so 
that throughout the moral realm nature invari- 
ably posits herself as properly subject to man, 
or defers to him as her own legitimate and ade- 



356 The stupendous Antics of Fichte 

quate sovereign. What else explains our ra- 
tional growth ? How else is it that we alone 
reject the light of sense as competent for our 
guidance, and substitute for it the more subtle 
and penetrating flame of reason in all our con- 
clusions ? 

Clearly then Kant was as treacherous to sci- 
ence as he was to Philosophy, as disloyal to 
reason as he was to Revelation, in making the 
objective sphere of human life fall outside of 
man's subjectivity or below it, rather than with- 
in or above it. He systematically identified the 
realm of the not-me with nature instead of God : 
or if he allowed it any pertinency to the latter 
designation, it could only be by divesting God 
meanwhile of every spiritual attribute, and pos- 
tulating Him as a purely natural existence sep- 
arated from man by the totality of space and 
time, or the integrality of nature. It is as in- 
structive as it is melancholy to observe how 
the whole current of subsequent philosophic, or 
rather logical, speculation in Germany reflected 
the unhappy scientific bias Kant had thus im- 
pressed upon it, by hastening to precipitate 
itself into the fatal embraces of Pantheism. For 
of course if, not negligently but on principle, 
you exteriorate object to subject, being to seem- 
ing, substance to form, you necessarily exalt the 
minor element of thought to the unchallenged 
primacy of its major element, and consequently 
end by identifying man with Deity. Fichte 
accordingly in accepting without examination 
the Kantian analysis of knowledge, found him- 



Schelling and Hegel thereupon. 357 

self logically driven to interpret Philosophy as 
a scheme of absolute subjective Idealism, in de- 
claring the me the sole and universal reality. 
Pantheism was only impossible on this meagre 
stoical basis, because God himself according to 
Fichte is but a creature of the me. It was not 
that the system fell short of God, but exceeded 
Him, or absorbed Him in its own ampler con- 
tents. Pantheism, according to this stupendous 
tom-foolery, supplies an imperfect theory of the 
universe, only because God Himself falls short 
of the universality of the me : /. e. cannot pre- 
tend, in vulgar parlance, to be near so great a 
swell. Schelling transformed Fichte's subjective 
scheme into one of objective idealism, without 
in the least degree arraigning, or even suspect- 
ing, the egregious scientific blunder or fallacy 
of observation on which it was based. In fact 
Schelling merely affirmed in contradiction to 
Fichte the coreality of subject and object, or 
man and nature : the affirmation being just as 
barren of philosophic consequences strictly speak- 
ing as its predecessor had been ; since its author 
had no sooner vindicated the joint and equal sci- 
entific validity of subject and object or of man 
and nature, than he at once proceeded to demon- 
strate their joint and equal philosophic invalid- 
ity, by resolving them both into an inconceivable 
transcendental identity or indifference, which, in- 
stead of vivifying them both, simply obliterates 
or neutralizes them both ; and which he there- 
upon calls The Absolute ; in fact the head of 
that distinguished family of Absolutes of whom 



358 The Testimony of Sense one thing: 

Sheridan's Sir Anthony was a diminished speci- 
men. Thus it was however that Schelling labo- 
riously cleared the way for that unscrupulous 
juggle of "the identity of contradictories " — 
L e. the identity of yes and no, white and black, 
true and false, good and evil, right and wrong — 
which was soon in the hands of a hardier thau- 
maturgist to arrest the intellectual progress, and 
even undo the intellectual existence, of the race ; 
not merely by confounding God with the uni- 
verse and proving creation in any sincere sense 
of the term an abject swindle : for all this had 
been already gleefully accomplished by Schell- 
ing : but by converting our very faculty of 
knowledge itself upon which we fondly relied 
to give us eternal conjunction with God, into a 
faculty of unlimited self-deception merely : i. e. 
into a guarantee of our eternal and most right- 
eous incorporation in the devil. 

But we have by no means done with Kant. 

What I want to bring my reader clearly to see 
in the end, is, that Kant's analysis of knowledge 
vitiates the integrity of the mind or destroys its 
unity, simply by making consciousness repro- 
duce — instead of annul — the fallacious separa- 
tion which sense organizes between man and 
nature. To Kant's senses he himself existed 
within the visible limits of his own body ; na- 
ture existed without those limits ; and God 
existed (if indeed any such existence were) still 
without the limits of nature. This is all very 
harmless and inevitable. The foundations of 
the mind are laid in sense, and he who quarrels 



that of Consciousness another, 35-9 

with them because they are directly fallacious 
and only inversely true, forgets that the founda- 
tion of every edifice physical or mental would 
be plainly inadequate to its function, unless what 
was ceiling to itself became floor to the super- 
structure ; or what was heaven to the one be- 
came earth to the other. So far then Kant is 
blameless. 

But Kant instantly ceases to be blameless 
when he proceeds to reproduce this necessity of 
the foundation in the freedom of the superstruc- 
ture itself, by reorganizing sense in the outraged 
lineaments of consciousness. Sense divides 
where consciousness unites ; and to represent 
the one therefore as simply reflecting the verdict 
of the other, is virtually to stop the growth of 
the mind and fix it in infancy. Physically, or 
to my own senses and those of other men, I 
exist in one place and nature in another. But 
mentally or to my own rational consciousness I 
am consubstantiate and coextensive with nature 
in all time and all space, having no life but what 
she imparts. She supplies every sensation every 
emotion every perception I experience ; in short 
my sensibility and intelligence are completely 
filled out and vivified with her substance, so 
that a conscious unity reigns where sense records 
only a lifeless duality. Descartes made thought 
the argument of existence. Cogito, ergo sum. 
Yes, but this reasoning avails to nature quite as 
much as to myself; since thought is always con- 
crete never abstract, /. e. presents me and nature 
in indissoluble unity. Thought is always com- 



360 Kant remorselessly confounds 

posite never simple ; a product of marriage not 
of concubinage ; in short a fact of most orderly 
relation and therefore of unity between two sen- 
sibly divided existences, never of mere disorderly 
finiteness and disunion. " I think," says Des- 
cartes. " But what do you think ? " I reply. 
"You cannot think nothing. If you think, you 
are bound to think something : which something 
is furnished you either 1, by nature directly; or 
2, by God as imagined by you under natural 
attributes ; or else 3, by yourself as similarly 
imagined : so that nature may be said to furnish 
directly or indirectly the whole substance or body 
of your thought, while you yourself give it mere 
visible surface or cuticle. Thus you may think 
things which are directly presented in sense, such 
as stones or trees or horses or houses or lands or 
waters : or you may think things which are only 
indirectly presented there, /. e. re-presented ; 
namely rational things, such as goodness and 
truth, evil and falsity, simplicity and deceit, 
magnanimity and meanness, pride and humility, 
chastity and uncleanness: but whether you think 
one or the other, the process of your thought is 
invariably concrete not discrete, and forbids you 
accordingly to allege within its own living or 
conscious limits the distribution of object and 
subject, or the duality of nature and man." 

Now Kant, practically at least, ignored this 
all-important truth, in persistently separating be- 
tween the subject and object of knowledge, or 
in representing knowledge not as evidencing a 
mental unity in the midst of a physical diversity, 



'Things so essentially distinft. 361 

but as organizing a most real and substantial di- 
versity where sense ordains only a seeming and 
formal one. I have no doubt for my own part 
that he also theoretically ignored the truth of 
the case ; for although he in terms acknowledges 
nature as contributing the matter of knowledge 
while we contribute only its form, he yet organ- 
izes such a controversy between these livingly 
united elements, as plainly proves that he for his 
part conceives that puny and pedantic reflex of 
the truth upon his understanding, to be the vital 
truth itself: thus reducing knowledge from a 
purely synthetic to a purely analytic function, or 
swamping consciousness, which affirms both in- 
finite and finite, both absolute and relative, in 
sense, which affirms only the finite and relative. 
In short Kant regarded the mind as strictly an 
individual possession, and never suspected its 
universal scientific unity. He looked upon his 
own mind as shut up spatially to his corporeal 
limits, so that he as a mental subject not less 
than a physical one might be said to exist in 
time and space, or claim to be only here and 
now while nature was everywhere and always. 
He had not the remotest idea that nature reflects 
the united and entire mental personality of the 
race, and that he himself consequently had no 
mind apart from nature : on the contrary he 
maintained that we by the forms of our sensibil- 
ity and understanding furnished the entire per- 
sonality of nature, and consequently viewed 
himself as absolutely, or within the spatial di- 
mensions of his body, a seeing, hearing, smell- 



362 He thought Finite and Relative 

ing, tasting, and touching, in short, knowing, 
subject ; and then as simply applying these 
absolute faculties to natural things. 

Perhaps we may illustrate Kant's philosophic 
insolvency more succinctly to the reader's appre- 
hension by saying, that he conceived the finite 
and relative to be one and the same existence, 
or at all events looked upon the latter as bearing 
a direct and not an inverse ratio to the former. 
His habitual though no doubt inconsiderate iden- 
tification of science whose testimony is wholly 
of the relative, with sense whose witness is 
wholly of the finite, warrants us perfectly to say 
that such practically at least was his error. And 
no error can be more disastrous to Philosophy, 
since it vacates the only basis to which Philoso- 
phy may lay claim, namely, the distinctively sci- 
entific evolution of the human mind. Existence 
or the finite is given in sense, and in sense alone. 
Life or the relative is given in consciousness, 
and consciousness alone. Existence is presup- 
posed in life, the finite is presupposed in the 
relative, just as sense is presupposed in conscious- 
ness : and for that very reason there can be no 
direct but only an inverse accord between them, 
precisely like that which exists between a house 
and its foundation, or between substance and 
shadow. Science accordingly, as concerned 
only with the higher phenomenon of life or the 
relative, takes existence or the finite for granted; 
using the materials which sense supplies without 
the least distrust of their absoluteness. But let 
sense beware how she presumes upon this good- 



to be one and the same Conception. 363 

natured attitude of science ! Let her take good 
heed lest she desert her own humble province, 
which is that of attesting the finite exclusively, 
and assume on that experience to attest the rela- 
tive as well ! For science in that case must 
instantly pronounce her a false witness. Sense 
is perfectly competent to attest facts of simple 
or disunited existence, facts of body in other 
words : and within all this range consequently 
her testimony is absolute over all but metaphysi- 
cians and madmen. But the moment she at- 
tempts to suggest a fact of life or soul, which is 
a composite fact, a fact of relation and therefore 
of order, she makes herself simply ridiculous. 
She reveals to us sun moon and stars existing 
each in visible contrast or oppugnancy to the 
others; but if she goes on to allege the scientific 
order which nevertheless binds these discordant 
bodies in the unity of a pervasive soul or life, 
she is sure to turn the truth literally and exactly 
upside down. 

Now Kant was practically indifferent to this 
all-important mental hierarchy. He thought 
that the relative as well as the finite — facts of 
logical ratio or order as well as facts of palpable 
existence or body — were given in sense; thus 
that the analogy of one to the other was always 
direct never inversive : and he consequently 
plunged — drawing the unsuspecting and even 
jubilant Sir William after him — into a tipsy 
scientific imbroglio only to be rivalled by the 
folly of an architect, who, fancying a house to 
be a mere extension of its foundation, a direct 



364 Consciousness marries 

and not an inverse projection of its base, should 
insist upon building it downwards instead of 
upwards ; or by that of a pedant, who, looking 
upon his coat and trousers as a direct and not 
inverted form of his body, as a continuation and 
not a correspondence of his person, should insist 
upon wearing those astonished garments inside 
out. It was in fact the inveterate because un- 
suspected error of both of these distinguished 
men, as it is of all men whose attention has 
never been given to the subject, to confound the 
rational or composite in experience with the 
finite or simple, thus to dissolve life in mere 
existence, or swamp the spiritual and generative 
element in consciousness in its strictly material 
and passive constitutional conditions. They 
both of them saw very clearly that every fact 
of mere existence or physics as given in sense, 
involves a dual or divided parentage ; that is to 
say, exhibits its objective element falling appar- 
ently without never within its subjective element. 
But they neither of them ever saw — what how- 
ever is of much nearer concern to Philosophy — 
that every fact of life or metaphysics as given in 
consciousness, presents an inextinguishable fu- 
sion or unity of these previously divided ele- 
ments — how? simply by operating the thorough 
interioration of the objective one to the subjec- 
tive. Let me explain. 

I perceive the rose. Here is a verbal propo- 
sition reciting a strictly unitary fact of percep- 
tion, i. e. of life, existing only in consciousness, 
in language borrowed from sense. It recites a 



what Sense divorces. 365 

pure fact of marriage, and therefore exclusively 
of relation, in terms belonging to simple unwed- 
ded existence ; analyzing it back from the unity 
it presents in consciousness to the disjunction it 
exhibits in sense. Sense puts me here and the 
rose there : that is, it exteriorates object to sub- 
ject or postpones substance to form. To my 
senses I exist in hopeless disunion with nature, 
the rose being invariably in one place and I in 
another; so that no possibility offers of any sen- 
sible coalition between us. And reason of course 
so long as it is in abeyance to the mere light of 
Nature, repeats the servile lesson and fills science 
with the echo of an eternal discord. But spir- 
itually the truth is exactly opposite. To my 
living consciousness, (of course not to my mem- 
ory or merely reflective one, with which Kant 
and Sir William Hamilton commonly confound 
it) I am indissolubly one with nature ; the men- 
tal or metaphysical experience called sight or 
smell or hearing or taste or touch, being nothing 
but the literal consummation of a spiritual mar- 
riage between us so intimate and vital that only 
the absolute decease of the parties can dissolve 
it. Life annuls within its own limits the sensi- 
ble distinction between me and nature, by bring- 
ing nature within my subjectivity or making it 
vivify my intelligence. I should be literally 
uninformed with mind or soul, which is life, 
unless the patent disunion enacted between me 
and nature by sense, gave way to the higher 
latent unity revealed in consciousness. Con- 
sciousness, the living consciousness, always posits 



366 Kant reduces Philosophy 

me mentally or psychically, as made up and con- 
stituted of my natural sensibilities and suscepti- 
bilities, so that in dissolving the unity between 
me and nature, you literally discharge me of 
soul or life. Every fact of mental experience 
accordingly blends me and nature in indissoluble 
unity, whatever previous disunion mere sense 
ordains between us ; and Kant only proves his 
own thorough misconception of the truth, when 
he interprets the experience into a fact of di- 
vorce instead of marriage. The truth is that 
Kant merely dissects the dead body of an expe- 
rience after its living or unitary soul has fled ; 
and finding naturally enough no evidence there 
of the marriage which life alone constitutes, he 
makes the tie between man and nature to have 
been one of dry and hopeless celibacy on both 
sides ; or if he permits it to be spiritually pro- 
lific in any case it is only par amours and never 
by any inwardly authenticated nuptials. In this 
poor pedantic way, fumbling within the disor- 
ganized carcass of an experience to catch the 
perished odor of its life, Kant and Sir William 
Hamilton succeeded at last to their perfect satis- 
faction in reducing the man of science to a coro- 
ner, and the philosopher to an undertaker. The 
insufferable airs of all-sufficiency which Sir Wil- 
liam especially puts on as he now flourishes the 
scalpel of the former, now wields the pickaxe 
and spade of the latter, while they dispel all 
doubt that his notions of Philosophy owed much 
less to his soft warm broad human heart, than to 
his hard cold narrow Scotch head, would be 



to a Requiem for the Dead. 367 

purely ludicrous if they had not the power which 
all false pretension has in proportion to its auda- 
city, to impose upon the servile imagination of 
scholars. 

What can be more clear than that the living 
perception in question (my perception of the 
rose) does not reproduce, but on the contrary 
completely annuls within its own precincts the 
duality or distance which sense alleges between 
me and nature, by converting it into an inextin- 
guishable mental unity ? Life to be sure does 
not war with existence, consciousness with 
sense. The former merely unites what the 
latter divides. Such is the perpetual miracle 
of life reflected in consciousness. Existence 
as given in sense makes nature fall without 
my subjectivity, so impoverishing me by all 
her wealth. Life on the other hand as given 
in consciousness reverses this ungenerous de- 
cree, or presents nature so intimately fused and 
blent with myself that it is no longer possi- 
ble for me consciously to discriminate between 
us, both of us in fact becoming indissolubly 
married in what is called my mind or intelli- 
gence, i. e. my mental personality. Life and 
mind are convertible terms. Science brings 
all nature within the realm of mind, or stamps 
it with the unity of a man. What we call 
the laws of Nature are in truth projections 
of our own mind exclusively, claiming an ob- 
jective validity to us individually only because 
the mental unity they express is that of the 
race and not of the individual. When the 



368 Nature is a mere Correspondence 

man of science attributes certain facts of na- 
ture to what he calls the influence of gravi- 
tation, he has or should have no intention to 
intimate that there is any such thing in na- 
ture, any such substance or entity, as gravi- 
tation. The word marks a mere mental gen- 
eralization on our part of certain widely 
diffused and various facts of experience, the 
generalization itself being only an instinctive 
effort of the common or associate mind of 
the race to indue itself, by the instrumental- 
ity of the individual mind, with that perfect 
scientific form or order which shall constitute 
its own eventual and permanent self-conscious- 
ness. All these generalizations of our natu- 
ral experience are only so many approxima- 
tions, on the part of the common mind of 
the race, to the recognition of its own univer- 
sality and unity. Nature is but the spiritual 
man turned inside out, or the contents of his 
otherwise unknown and unimaginable spiritual 
personality revealed to his senses. It is not 
a substance, but the shadow of a substance 
whose reality is altogether spiritual. Yet when 
you see the energy with which our so-called 
philosophers pursue cause to its last fastness, 
and seek to waylay heat and take light cap- 
tive in the web of their cunning devices, or 
bleat forth idle prayers to know what after all 
is electricity and what magnetism, you must 
inevitably infer that the living and unitary sub- 
stance they seek under all these shifting forms, 
the absolute personality they demand under all 



of the Things of the Mind. 369 

these Protean disguises, is altogether physical 
and not mental. Never was a grosser hallucina- 
tion. The unity which underlies and animates 
all the so-called forces of nature, is exclusively 
human and not physical, belonging to the sphere 
of consciousness not of sense, being nothing 
more nor less than the unity of the universal 
human mind itself. These things are only so 
many flash ings-forth through the chinks of sense 
and reason, of a great spiritual fact too subtle 
ever to be otherwise apprehended, namely, the 
unity or personality of the great race itself. They 
are none of them things which exist in nature : 
they are all of them only so many revelations or 
inverted images of itself which the human mind 
projects upon the mirror of natural fact, and by 
means of which it will ultimately come to a true 
self-consciousness ; or what is the same thing, to 
the recognition of life as exclusively spiritual in 
substance, while material only in form or appear- 
ance, out of deference to the needs of our nascent 
intelligence. Science is only a blind instinctive 
groping under the flickering guidance of reason 
after this most human unity which subtends all 
the disjointed facts of existence and gives them 
life. 1 From the lowest or most diffused and 
therefore most inhuman type of life exhibited in 
nature which is gravitation, up to its highest or 

1 The well-meant efforts of cessantly haunted, must prove 

Mr. Grove Mr. Faraday and a simply abortive, so long as they 

thousand similar conscientious look upon Nature as involving 

men of science, to lay this ghost her own substance, or confessing 

of a unitary or presiding natu- any unity out of the human 

ral force by which they are in- mind. 
24 



370 Man the Unity of Nature. 

most concentrated and therefore most human 
type, which is spontaneity, science sees not na- 
ture but man, and consequently demands of Phi- 
losophy a metaphysics which shall no longer ex- 
clude physics, but reverently accept its slightest 
admonition. 






CHAPTER XXI. 

If the foregoing considerations be well 
weighed, I think the reader will not fail to 
agree with me, that the regulative authority 
which Kant claims for the subjective element 
in knowledge over the objective element, turns 
out a purely chimerical pretension ; is in fact 
the exact opposite of the truth. For whenever 
and wherever the relation of object and subject 
befalls, the former term of the relation will al- 
ways be found to claim of strictest right the 
prior interior and controlling place, while the 
latter spontaneously sinks to a secondary and 
subordinate one. I can hardly bring myself to 
believe that Kant ever exercised a deliberate 
scrutiny upon the mental experience in question, 
so little does the fact of the case justify his anal- 
ysis. Thus, I perceive the rose ; or I think the 
rose. This perception, says Kant, or this thought 
involves two antagonist elements : l, you the 
seeing or thinking subject; and 2, the rose, 
which is the seen or thought object : and of 
these two the former rightfully controls the 
latter. The first of these statements as we have 
already seen is practically fallacious and mislead- 
ing: the last is simply untrue. The former 
statement is fallacious, because Kant treats the 



372 Alleged Duality of Man 

alleged involution of these antagonist elements 
as a fact practically of evolution ; and the latter 
statement is untrue, because wherever the rela- 
tion of object and subject is legitimately evolved, 
the former element invariably commands the 
prior interior and controlling place, while the 
latter spontaneously seeks a wholly secondary or 
subordinate one. 

I. It seems hardly worth while to dwell any 
longer upon the former of these errors, since the 
reader must by this time have become con- 
vinced that no fact of life, as such, can evolve 
the sensible discrimination of subject and object, 
or man and nature ; simply because it constitu- 
tionally involves such discrimination, and to 
evolve it therefore would be to yield up its life, 
or sacrifice all that is characteristic about it as 
distinct from mere existence. Every fact of 
perception or thought, /. e. of life, involves on 
its mere physical or constitutional side the sensi- 
ble discrimination in question ; but do you not 
see that if you make it go on to reproduce that 
discrimination metaphysically or consciously as 
well, you perpetually adjourn its individuality, 
or discharge it of life, since all conscious life or 
individuality proceeds upon the absolute fusion 
of subject and object, or man and nature ? How 
could such reproduction take place indeed ex- 
cept in reflective form ? For the disorimination 
already exists as a fact of sense : to reproduce it 
therefore in the higher realm of consciousness 
would be greatly to impoverish consciousness, 
by making it a mere reflection of sense. Con- 



and Nature in Consciousness. 373 

sciousness differs from sense in that it unites 
what the latter divides; it is in every case a 
marriage between things which are previously 
given singly in sense ; so that to represent it as 
reproducing this sensible discrimination would 
be like representing marriage to consist of di- 
vorce. Sense asserts the existing difference of 
subject and object, or man and nature; con- 
sciousness their living unity. Life is the unity 
of object and subject, just as water is the unity 
of oxygen and hydrogen, the unity being a con- 
jugal one in both cases. But surely conjugality 
does not imply but on the contrary excludes the 
bare conception of divorce. Divorce ensues 
only where conjugality ceases. If then he would 
be an undoubted dolt, scientifically, who should 
represent water as a product of the distinction 
between oxygen and hydrogen, water itself be- 
ing the absolute fusion or indistinguishable unity 
of those substances : so he must be a much 
greater dolt, philosophically, who interprets life 
into the sensible discrimination of subject and 
object, or man and nature : for life presents a far 
more intense marriage of subject and object, a 
far more vivid and dazzling fusion of man and 
nature, than water can pretend to present of oxy- 
gen and hydrogen. The bare offer of such an 
interpretation in fact proves the offerer incompe- 
tent even to the recognition of the true problem, 
let alone its discussion : since it shows him de- 
liberately reducing it from one of life to one of 
mere existence, or degrading it out of the realm 
of consciousness into that of sense. 



374 2fctf/ Unity of Man and 

Still let us linger upon the mistake a little 
longer, if by so doing I may more fully illustrate 
the truth upon the subject. 

We have already seen that every fact of life 
whatever, that is, every mental experience of 
every kind implying the intercourse of body and 
soul in its subject, presupposes to that extent a 
marriage-fusion between object and subject so 
intimate or vital, that it is impossible to distrib- 
ute the parties to it, or say how much of the 
experience is contributed by one and how much 
by the other. Every act of life or conscious- 
ness, just because it is the offspring of this inter- 
nal or spiritual marriage between man and na- 
ture, presupposes in order to its own genesis the 
outward or sensible diversity of the parties to 
the marriage, that is to say, presupposes the log- 
ical copulation of an active object (nature) with 
a passive or reactive subject (man). In short 
every such fact of life or consciousness involves 
constitutionally or in order to its own develop- 
ment and manifestation, the dual parentage in 
question : but for that reason it cannot actively 
or livingly evolve it. Precisely this however is 
Kant's mistake. He makes life evolve existence 
not involve it ; the child evolve its parents in- 
stead of involve them ; and by a necessary fatal- 
ity turns consciousness from a purely spiritual 
force to a material one, so converting infinite 
into finite, personality into mere reality, or man 
into a thing. Never was a grosser violence done 
to Philosophy. The finite is one with itself or 
identical : how is it possible to allege therefore 



Nature in Consciousness. 375 

within its proper limits the logical contradiction 
of subject and object, of the me and the not- 
me ? The finite is the exclusive realm of the 
me, /. e. of subjectivity; the infinite of the not- 
me, /. e. of objectivity. Every thing in nature 
says me with equal pertinency though with un- 
equal emphasis. The mineral says it by its 
gravitation or vis inertia ; the vegetable by its 
sensibility ; the animal by its volition ; man by 
his spontaneity. One form of finite existence 
may thus be more or less sharply defined than 
another, but differ as they may in this respect, 
they are all alike remote from the infinite. The 
elephant because it claims a longer life and a 
larger body than the flea, or involves in its ex- 
istence more of time and space, exhibits the 
finite principle in greater measure ; but he is 
not thereby the more nearly approximated to 
the infinite. On the contrary if any difference 
could exist in that regard, it would be to his 
disadvantage, inasmuch as he is the more finite 
of the two. The elephant indeed is an inferior 
form of animation to the flea, because its exist- 
ence is so much more largely implicative of 
lower forms of life ; just as an animal double 
the bulk of the elephant and twice as long- 
lived, would pronounce itself an inferior form 
of animality to him, by exhibiting double his 
own appropriation of vegetable and mineral 
characteristics. But these are all merely vari- 
ous grades of the Finite, not with reference to 
the infinite, but within itself; for the greatest 
conceivable intensity of the finite constitutes, 



376 The Objective sphere in Life 

not the greatest nearness to, but the greatest re- 
moteness from, the Infinite. Infinity implies 
not the totality of Space, but its revocation or 
disappearance ; just as Eternity implies not the 
endless potentialization of Time, but its sheer 
consumption and denial. 

II. The second point made by Kant in the 
foregoing analysis of perception, is even more 
frivolous, and need detain us but a moment. It 
is that what he calls the subjective element in 
every living transaction dominates of right what 
he calls the objective element : thus that when I 
perceive the rose my faculty of perception, con- 
sidered as spatially isolated to my organization, 
controls or shapes the rose considered as spa- 
tially isolated from my organization, in such a 
manner as to confer upon the rose all its qual- 
ity, or deprive it of substantive character. 

Now Kant's initial blunder here, as we have 
already seen, consists in his confounding a fact 
of consciousness and therefore of fusion or unity, 
with a fact of sense and therefore of division or 
disunion. But allowing this to pass for the mo- 
ment, and accepting for the sake of argument 
his preposterous distribution of subject and ob- 
ject in consciousness as valid, still the inference 
which he draws from it as to the regulative au- 
thority of the subject over the object, is intensely 
and scandalously fallacious. It is always the 
objective element in life which regulates or 
shapes the subjective element, never the con- 
trary. It is the rose which in the act of knowl- 
edge or perception holds the prior or command- 



always controls the SubjetJive. 377 

ing place ; it is my (so-called) " faculty " of 
knowledge or perception which holds the alto- 
gether secondary and submissive place. Noth- 
ing but the most unquestioning acquiescence in 
the dictation of sense, can account for the oppo- 
site conclusion. It seems indeed hardly needful 
to argue the point, a bare statement sufficing to 
justify it. For clearly I as a knowing subject, 
am constituted not by any abstract " faculty of 
knowing " I possess, but simply and sheerly by 
the concrete objects which I know. These things 
alone constitute the substance of my knowledge, 
so that if you deprive me of them, you deprive 
me at the same time, so far as knowledge is con- 
cerned, of subjective consciousness : though I 
should possess all the abstract " faculties " in 
that direction conceivable. My consciousness, 
as a knowing subject, is determined not by any- 
thing in itself but by the things known. De- 
prive me then of the object of knowledge, and 
you at once stifle my subjectivity. I am a 
knowing subject only in so far as some known 
object makes me one. To say therefore that I 
as subject regulate the object: that I as know- 
ing qualify the thing known : is very like say- 
ing, is indeed the same thing in effect as saying, 
that the child qualifies the parent, that the cul- 
prit gives character to the law. No doubt the 
child implies the parent ; no doubt the culprit 
presupposes the law : but no one can seriously 
maintain that the child begets the parent; that 
the thief adjudicates the legal property of the 
community. Just as little is any one entitled to 



378 The ground of Kanfs mistake. 

maintain that I in knowing peaches impart to 
peaches their flavor and other attributes, or in 
knowing anything else give the thing known 
the least of its possessions. Whatever it pos- 
sesses it possesses in the strictest independence 
of me, and, so far as I know it, claims me as its 
abject subject, incapable henceforth of unknow- 
ing it, or throwing off such subjection, while to 
the same extent positing itself of course as the 
controlling object of my knowledge. 

The root of Kant's hallucination on this sub- 
ject and every other, was his inveterate intellect- 
ual habit of running facts of life or conscious- 
ness into mere facts of existence or sense. But 
I have already made this plain enough to the 
most ordinary apprehension, and I will not dwell 
upon it. Let us rather ask now how this invet- 
erate intellectual habit on Kant's part originated; 
why Kant felt it thus necessary intellectually to 
construe facts of life into facts of existence, or 
make the realm of physics no longer serve but 
dominate that of metaphysics. 

The rationale of the phenomenon appears to 
me very plain. Kant wanted to account for 
existence, to explain creation, without resorting 
to the Deus ex ?nachina, which is the expedient 
of the vulgar theology : but having no concep- 
tion of any more real or spiritual Deus, and be- 
ing much too rich a man intellectually to accept 
any help in that line from the Christian revela- 
tion, he concluded to give over working the 
Deus-hypothesis altogether, and spin a creation 
out of the bowels of the • creature himself, or 



The ground of Kanfs mistake. 379 

excogitate a cosmos on exclusively cosmical data. 
Religion had become such a fossil to all intellect- 
ual uses, had so completely renounced the spir- 
itual nurture of her offspring, that her traditional 
testimony as to the Divine existence and opera- 
tion, confessed itself to his imagination a mere 
party shibboleth, a mere mercenary clamor for 
her own vested interests ; and consequently left 
him thoroughly quit of all obligation to her. 
But though religion was both unable and unwill- 
ing to show him how God spiritually creates 
all things, he had not the least notion that they 
were uncreated ; nor could he at the same time 
believe that they were self-created in the vulgar 
sense of the word creation, since every natural 
object confesses a natural parentage. What was 
the remedy then ? Creation demanded an inter- 
pretation, existence required to be explained : 
only such interpretation or explanation refused 
to take place on merely historic or actual princi- 
ples, and claimed an altogether transcendental 
basis, claimed in fact the sanction of a pure- 
ly intellectual and hence purely unintelligible 
world. Thus in order to account for existence, 
or explicate creation in this transcendental way, 
we must admit that the things which appear to 
us horses, roses, emeralds, men, are not real 
horses, real roses, real emeralds, real men, but 
only phenomenal ones shaped by our extortion- 
ate sensibility : are not horses and roses and 
emeralds and men such as these things are in- 
themselves, and apart from our mischievous in- 
terference, but a set of counterfeits degraded to 



380 The ground of Kant's mistake. 

the level of our degrading intelligence. These 
things, since they derive all their qualities from 
us, have no selfhood, no being-in-themselves, 
and are consequently uncreated, being pure 
phantasms or will-of-the-wisps bred of our fatu- 
ous sensibility and intelligence. To get accord- 
ingly at the true philosophy of creation, we must 
demand a purely intellectual world, a world of 
purely noumenal things, which we can never 
apprehend either by sense or reason, nor even 
so much as affirm the existence of, since exist- 
ence implies sensible finiteness and logical order 
or relation : but which for that very reason pos- 
sess their being-in-themselves, thus are real things, 
and hence created. 

In this puerile pedantic way Kant was de- 
lighted to reduce the sincere realm of Nature to 
an intellectual mirage, to convert her most fixed 
and absolute existences, her most ample and lu- 
minous order or harmony, into sheer illusions of 
our ignorance : so stamping all our knowledge 
and all our belief with permanent imbecility. 
He had as a philosopher two discordant orders 
of facts to deal with : facts of nature and facts 
of history ; facts of identity and facts of indi- 
viduality ; facts of existence and facts of life ; 
facts of sense and facts of consciousness ; facts 
of finiteness and facts of infinitude; facts of 
order or relationship, and facts of personality 
or absoluteness : but instead of marrying these 
facts indissolubly together and bringing out by 
that conjunction a higher unity than either series 
by itself supplied, he was content to swamp the 



The ground of Kant's mistake. 381 

higher series in the lower, and so evade e very- 
problem he felt himself unable to solve. He is 
like the schoolboy who throws his algebra in the 
river rather than face the requisitions of to-mor- 
row's lesson. He would not regard us as true 
subjects of nature, because forsooth it pleased 
him not to regard nature herself as possessing 
any objective reality ! Depriving us in this 
rude hobbledehoy fashion of our legitimate nat- 
ural identity, he of course robs us a fortiori of 
our legitimate spiritual individuality ; and hence 
leaves himself free to draw at pleasure upon that 
realm of transcendental moonshine, in which 
what he calls our noumena, or real selves, 
breathe and browse in eternal unconscious- 
ness. 

The whole speculation is inexpressibly childish. 
My identity — whatsoever gives me existence to 
my own consciousness, enables me to recognize 
myself, or say me, mine, and by implication there- 
fore thee, thine — belongs to Nature, is wholly 
contingent upon her sovereign will. I am con- 
scious only by virtue of my natural senses or 
organization. Take that away, and what should 
I know ? Take away my knowledge, and what 
basis should I have for belief? Take away 
both knowledge and belief, both sense and un- 
derstanding, and how much of me would re- 
main? Where in that case should I be, and 
what ? Could I be said to be at all indeed ? 
To be sure some philosopher in search of an 
anchorage, might allege that I would still have 
my unconscious being in God. But my uncon- 



382 Are we properly Attive 

scious being is precisely what is not my being 
but God's. I have not the slightest title to any 
being in myself but what my consciousness gives 
me. Unconscious being to a created one is con- 
tradictory. My consciousness is what separates 
me and alone separates me from God, in identi- 
fying me with Nature and Society. If conse- 
quently you take away my bodily organization, 
which is the sole ground of my consciousness or 
alone identifies me with nature and my fellow- 
man, you reduce me to nonentity. I should be 
like a house deprived of its foundation in the 
ground, and would at once cease to be. 

Thus it is nature which gives me identity, 
and in that gift insures me all my power of sub- 
sequent spiritual expansion or individuality. She 
constitutes me, not I her. We know or per- 
ceive natural things alone, the horse, the tree, 
the mountain, the cloud, the river. Take these 
and similar natural things away, and we should 
know no-thing; that is, we should not know at 
all. Knowledge does not inhere in me apart 
from my subjection to nature. I know alto- 
gether by virtue of such subjection. In know- 
ing the rose for example I put forth no power; 
so far as my proper individual force or activity 
is concerned, I am as helpless as the babe un- 
born. I cannot help knowing it. My natural 
organization endows me with the knowledge 
without asking my leave. To say therefore that 
I, cogitated apart from this helpless subjection 
to nature, possess or put forth any faculty of 
knowledge, is transparent nonsense. I have no 



or Passive in Knowledge ? 383 

such faculty of knowing, because I have no 
such faculty of being. All my sensible knowl- 
edge, or sensible experience of every sort, is a 
fact exclusively of my natural identity with, and 
indistinction from, every other subject of my 
nature ; and not in the slightest degree of my 
spiritual individuality or difference from them. 
To all the extent of my natural organization — - 
that is to say, within the entire range of my 
inherited passions appetites and susceptibilities 
of every sort — I am an unmixed and helpless 
subject of nature, and so far identical with every 
other subject. Were it not for this fixed basis 
of identity or community with other men to be- 
gin with, all my characteristic individuality or 
diversity from them, which grows out of my 
subsequent action, would be simply impossible 
and inconceivable. 

In its last analysis then this conception of 
noumenal existence is a denial, in so far forth as 
it is predicated, of creatureship : since existence 
in-itself is precisely what no creature has or can 
have except by creation. And if it have it by 
creation, then clearly the true scope or object of 
Philosophy determines itself, with surprising 
distinctness, to be the creative perfection itself 
exclusively, from which so marvellous a boon 
proceeds. If the spiritual individuality which 
all existence reveals be the true quest of Philos- 
ophy, (as its natural identity is the true quest 
of science), you cannot of course trace that in- 
dividuality to the creative infinitude, without 
making this infinitude henceforth the sole legiti- 



384 Noumenal 'Existence 

mate aim of Philosophy. Here it was egre- 
giously that Kant stumbled, and by stumbling 
brought all his servile followers into a confused 
ignominious heap on top of him. He utterly 
misconceived the true mission of Philosophy. 
He supposed it had to do directly with the crea- 
ture and only indirectly with the creator; where- 
as the exact converse of this proposition is true. 
He conceived in other words that the true search 
of Philosophy was into what gave the creature 
natural identity or subjective consciousness, and 
not what gave it spiritual individuality or objec- 
tive being out of that natural identity ; so hope- 
lessly swamping his pursuit in science, or sinking 
the philosopher in the pedant. The sole prob- 
lem of Philosophy is creation : is to ascertain 
how the infinite creator imparts finite form to 
the creature ; a form which shall be the crea- 
ture's own and separate him to all eternity from 
the creator. It is obvious that no amount of scru- 
tiny into the creature's natural constitution will 
avail to elucidate this problem, simply because 
the natural constitution or existence of the crea- 
ture is involved or presupposed in his creation ; 
and to deduce the latter from the former conse- 
quently would be to deduce the parent from the 
child, or the heart and lungs from the circula- 
tion. The only way to solve the problem is to 
leave off looking at the mere identity of the 
creature as naturally posited, and commence re- 
garding his spiritual individuality which alone 
announces the creative presence and power within 
him. 



fatal to Creation. 385 

This natural identity of the creature is doubt- 
less all important to the interests of his subse- 
quent spiritual evolution; and in that point of 
view of course it cannot be too sedulously vin- 
dicated. Indeed it is my express aim to show 
that God cannot create things, or give them 
spiritual individuality, save in so far forth as He 
first forms them or gives them natural identity. 
Nevertheless, indeed all the more, these interests 
are not to be confounded : the strictly hierarchi- 
cal relation of servant and master, of base and 
building, of mould and form, invariably obtain- 
ing between them. To create a thing, as we 
have already said, is to give it inward or spirit- 
ual being ; but as nothing inwardly is which 
does not also outwardly exist or go forth in ap- 
propriate form, so we are necessarily led to insist 
that creation regarded as an objective work of 
God involves in order to its own truth a subjec- 
tive sphere of making or formation on the part 
of the creature. If it were not so, the creature 
must inevitably fail of that projection from his 
creative source which constitutes the actuality 
of the creative work. God himself who is 
infinite love and wisdom, constitutes the be- 
ing of the creature, or spiritually creates him : 
if therefore the creature were not formally dif- 
ferenced from God, or finited to his own con- 
sciousness, he would not exist even phenome- 
nally, and so far from ever coming to spiritual 
life, would forever lack even natural existence. 
To say all in a word, God's true creature is spirit- 
ual like God himself: but unless he be consciously 
25 



386 Nature necessary to posit 

separated from God, i. e. forever identified to 
his own perception, irreparable damage and 
confusion must ensue in the infinite becoming 
finite, and the finite infinite. 

Now I shall show by and by that it is Nature 
which alone fulfils this formative function. She 
it is that posits the creature to his own percep- 
tion. She fixes him, finites him, or gives him 
indestructible identity to his own consciousness, 
so forever discriminating him from the infinite. 
Unless the spiritual creation were naturally or- 
ganized, it could never get conscious embodi- 
ment or existence ; the spiritual creature remain- 
ing in that case hopelessly destitute of that 
needful projection from the creator which makes 
self-consciousness possible to him and so avouches 
the reality of his creation. For the existence of 
the creature is quite as necessary to the reality 
of creation as that of the creator is; and if 
therefore the former do not present himself in a 
form quite as validly his own, as that of the 
creator is validly His own, the problem is in- 
stantly vacated of all its pith; that is to say, 
creation confesses itself a sheer imposture, and 
slinks off at once into a despicable cowardly 
Pantheism. 

Kant had no perception of this needful impli- 
cation of natural existence in spiritual, and was 
consequently destitute of any commanding doc- 
trine of nature. His doctrine of Nature as we 
have seen was a mere shameless pilfering of the 
wardrobe of science in the interest of a tatter- 
demalion Philosophy. The man of science re- 



the Creature, or give him Identity. 387 

pudiates Kant consequently quite as heartily as 
the philosopher does. For in order to deprive 
Philosophy of a rational basis and render it im- 
possible, Kant, who saw no difference in the sub- 
ject matter of the two pursuits, was obliged to 
postulate the imbecility of science as well. In- 
stead of his ever suspecting even for a moment 
the pure subordination of science to Philosophy, 
and manfully acquiescing therefore in her pro- 
visional demonstration of the strict rationality 
of all existence, or its relativity to the human 
mind, his Critique of the Pure Reason is built 
upon the frankest possible assumption of the 
absoluteness of science. That is to say, he 
makes the understanding competent not merely 
to its own constitutional function, which is all 
simply to furnish the ratio or order which un- 
derlies all the data of sense, but also to the 
grandly creative office of assigning its own 
powers, defining its own empire, propounding 
its own laws, in short of bluffly saying d priori 
what it is totally incapable even of imagining 
save a posteriori. Kant fancied that he kept 
himself within the limits of experience, when 
discriminating between the formal and the ma- 
terial elements of knowledge. But not to in- 
sist (upon what nevertheless is conclusive on the 
subject) that our empirical knowledge can with 
no propriety of speech be made to include facts 
of life or consciousness, being confined wholly to 
facts of sense or memory : I have already abun- 
dantly shown that what Kant distinguishes as 
the formal or subjective, and the material or 



388 Important distinction between 

objective, elements of knowledge, are totally in- 
distinguishable in consciousness or life, and yield 
themselves up only to a post-mortem analysis, /. e. 
in unconsciousness or death. Never was a more 
subtle and flagrant case exhibited accordingly 
in the whole history of human thought, of the 
merest naturalism exalting itself into the highest 
places of Philosophy : of the conceited prag- 
matical little creature aping the prerogative of 
his great creator, and in fact practically shoving 
the latter from his stool. 

But after all we must be just to Kant individ- 
ually. The sensuous prejudice which deflected 
his judgment on all this subject he shares with 
almost all the learned. Almost nowhere as yet 
among the learned, so far as I can discover, is the 
distinction recognized between identity and indi- 
viduality, between community and society, be- 
tween our conscious existence and our uncon- 
scious being. The French asserters of a spiritual 
Philosophy, Maine de Biran, Theodore JourTroy, 
Cousin, Emile Saisset, Paul Janet, and others, 
are struggling manfully towards a purely spirit- 
ual doctrine of life, inasmuch as they are intent 
upon wresting the moral instinct from the uses 
of a purblind materialism. Doubtless moral 
existence is the indispensable basis of spiritual 
life, and hence in maintaining the former inter- 
est intact, you essentially promote the latter. 
But the service is indirect, and no way justifies 
these generous disciples in pronouncing Philoso- 
phy herself wide awake. On the contrary their 
own persistent identification of the spiritual with 



Identity and Individuality. 389 

the moral element in life, or what is the same thing, 
the excessive strain they feel themselves obliged 
to put upon the Finite in order to inflate it to 
the dimensions of the Infinite, proves that she 
is at best but half-awake, and instead of truly 
mediating between her principals, is very often 
found doing little better than laboriously bump 
their astonished and unwilling heads together. 

What Philosophy craves for her final redinte- 
gration, is this complete intellectual discrimina- 
tion on our part of base from building, of our 
moral from our spiritual parts. Nothing but 
our habitual identification of these most dis- 
tinct interests, is required to explain the persis- 
tent degradation of our intellectual life. The 
cellar of our intellectual structure is kept so 
continuous with its drawing-room and bed-room 
floors — there is so little separation or even 
effort at separation between them — that it is 
no wonder that the effluvia of decayed vegeta- 
tion and animal disorganization pervade the 
house, or that vermin and dampness chase us up 
to our very garrets. How can the case be other- 
wise ? If I am basely content with my physical 
constitution merely, or what allies me in nature 
with animal and plant: if I am content even with 
my moral constitution alone, or what allies me nat- 
urally with my fellow-man, and feel no aspiration 
towards that interior or spiritual individuality 
which alone allies me directly with God : the 
higher parts of my mind, being void of their 
proper substance, of their true Divine inhabita- 
tion, must inevitably expand to every baleful 



39° Philosophy must accept 

exhalation from below: i.e. reflect and reproduce 
all the littleness, all the malignity and unclean- 
ness, which inhere both in my absolute native 
penury, and my comparative lack of personal 
culture/or refinement. 

In other words, what Philosophy demands in 
order to her thorough extrication from the falla- 
cies both of sense and reason, is the guiding 
light of Revelation. Our present so-called Phi- 
losophy has hitherto slighted this light in defer- 
ence to science, or with a view to exalt the lower 
and more fickle authority of reason. Of set 
purpose indeed she allows Revelation, so full of 
the profoundest intellectual wealth, a purely re- 
ligious significance, a merely tributary relation 
to natural theology, so exposing it to be tram- 
pled under the clownish and conceited hoofs of 
science : and she salves the wounds of the 
meek-eyed sufferer with a shrug at best of the 
most supercilious compassion. In short the 
fault of Philosophy is a defective self-conscious- 
ness, or so low a conception of her great office 
as leads her not to coordinate religion and sci- 
ence, not to harmonize the spiritual and moral 
life of man, but to give the latter and lower 
interest absolute priority of the higher ; both 
Kant and Sir William Hamilton for example 
accepting the scientific induction of life as final, 
and relegating Philosophy consequently in any 
real sense of the word into an idle chase of 
shadows. Philosophy must at once withdraw 
from this unworthy position, or else consent to 
fill the grave which Kant has dug for her, and 



the Guidance of Revelation. 391 

out of which Sir William with boyish audacity 
declares she is entitled to no honor. 

Religion and science are harmonized in Phi- 
losophy ; but for that very reason they are never 
to be confounded. Moral existence at its high- 
est is but the matrix of spiritual, and has no 
more pretension to be confounded with it, than 
the steward of a great house has to be confound- 
ed with its lord. There can be no objection to 
your doing the amplest justice to the steward, to 
your duly admiring his honest function, and 
estimating if you have the requisite information 
his assured and contingent emoluments. But 
do not forget that he is only a steward and 
shines with a reflected lustre. So is it with 
morality. It unquestionably lifts us out of 
animal conditions or separates us to to ccelo from 
all that is not man ; it constitutes us rational 
beings, having a power of control over our 
natural appetites and passions, and so insures 
us the supremacy of nature. Celebrate this 
great service as you will, only do not conceal 
its intrinsic subordination to spiritual ends. De- 
monstrate as vividly as you please the superior 
dignity of man to all the tribes of animated na- 
ture, in his possessing moral consciousness or a 
power of voluntary control over his merely 
animal contents. But do not forget for a mo- 
ment that this shining endowment of the hu- 
man form, deifying man as it does to the merely 
scientific eye, is yet by no means a finality or its 
own end : that it is itself in its turn but the 
humble earth of a far sublimer heaven, which 



392 Uncontrolled by Philosophy 

is that of man's spiritual destiny, the home of 
his immortal conjunction with God. It exists 
in fact only by the uses it promotes to this su- 
perior life. Our whole natural history is but a 
preparation for this great destiny. We come 
into nature with a superstitious belief in her 
absoluteness as affirmed by sense. Slowly the 
scientific reason relieves us of this tyranny. It 
gradually empties nature of substance in herself, 
and so prepares us for the mission of Philosophy 
which bids us recognize the end of all created 
things in man : not of course in man as still 
involved in nature, but as spiritually emancipa- 
ted from her by a signal Divine work accom- 
plished within her actual limits. 

Uncontrolled by Philosophy science is of ne- 
cessity atheistic ; because so long as we consider 
morality absolute, or regard it as the highest 
type of life, we necessarily identify its subject 
•with God, and vacate at last all valid ground of 
discrimination between creature and creator. If 
morality constitute the Divine style of life, it 
becomes evident at once that the difference be- 
tween God and man is not one of kind but only 
of degree ; is not the difference in other words 
of creator and creature, but of two equal sub- 
jects of the same law (as Dr. Bushnell delights 
to make it appear) one of whom may be 
much more perfect in his literal obedience, but 
cannot have the least pretension to prejudice the 
other's spiritual equality with him. And a 
sensuous Faith, a faith which exalts the crea- 
ture to the creator, or lowers the creator to the 



Science is necessarily Jtheistic. 393 

creature, by making the difference between them 
to be one of degree and not of kind, begets an 
atheistic Science, and a pantheistic Logic. Pan- 
theism in the sphere of thought, the intellectual 
sphere, is but the reverberation of a practical 
Atheism in the sphere of observation, the scien- 
tific sphere : which itself betrays the predomi- 
nance of sense in the sphere of life or experience. 
The human mind can no more exist without 
faith, than the body without a heart. Faith is 
indeed the heart of the mind, from which its 
life-blood (knowledge) primarily flows. But as 
sense which is the outward rind or body of the 
mind, its legs and arms, its multiform organs and 
enveloping cuticle, degrades whatsoever is spirit- 
ual in knowledge to what is carnal, it conse- 
quently returns to Faith no longer the ruddy life- 
giving tide it receives from her, but a blackened 
desecrated stream full of decay and death. Faith 
of course in her turn repugns the odious nutri- 
ment, and hands it over to reason, which is the 
lungs of the mind, for instant chastisement and 
defecation. But just as the lungs, when im- 
mersed in an atmosphere of their own making, 
no longer purify but only corrupt the blood, so 
reason unillumined by light from heaven, or shut 
up to her own earth which is sense, does not viv- 
ify but only inflates knowledge; does not sift 
what is mere dead fact within it from what is 
living truth, what is material from what is spir- 
itual: but only and at best modifies thought 
from an atheistic to a Pantheistic form : in place 
of saying there is no God, says that all is God : 



394 -dnd Logic Pantheistic. 

which is practically a worse thing, since a frank 
denial of the truth is much more hopeful than 
its specious falsification. 

To sum up: wherever science and not life ex- 
clusively constitutes the subject-matter of Philos- 
ophy, as it does in Kant and all later German 
speculation inspired by Kant, the result to Phi- 
losophy herself is not an accomplished creation, 
or life of man on earth, in which infinite and 
finite harmoniously coexist and reciprocally em- 
brace each other ; but a chaotic muddle and 
hopeless sophistication of the two which baffle 
discrimination and helplessly disorganize intelli- 
gence. In this state of things what needs to be 
done in order to disengage Philosophy and put 
her on her feet, is to show that the true life of 
man, what we properly term his creation, is 
primarily a spiritual process, exacting no doubt 
his moral experience as the needful theatre of its 
own manifestation, but for that very reason refus- 
ing to be individualized by it any more than the 
soul is individualized by the body, or the actor 
by the dress in which he temporarily plays his 
part. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

The difference between a spurious and a true 
Philosophy — i. e. between a doctrine of Nature 
which makes Nature herself to be God's true 
creature, and one which makes her purely inci- 
dental to the Divine creation — becomes strik- 
ingly plain when you turn from Kant and con- 
front Swedenborg. In Kant's hands Existence 
is declared to be unreal because it is finite and 
phenomenal, or without infinitude and absolute- 
ness in-itself. On the other hand to Swedenborg 
these very disqualifications are the sure vouchers 
of its reality ; since the infinitude and absolute- 
ness of a created thing must necessarily attach 
to the thing not in-itself, but in its creator. To 
Kant accordingly Nature is a mere intellectual 
mirage, incapable of basing any rational super- 
structure ; while to Swedenborg it is a solid 
earth of knowledge undecaying as the Divine 
perfection, and capable therefore of affording a 
most sure warrant to any amount of rational be- 
lief and expectation ; a most steadfast base to 
any height or depth or breadth of spiritual and 
celestial observation. 

Swedenborg's scheme of creative order is 
fashioned exclusively upon the truth of God's 
proper infinitude or perfection, which renders 



396 God is not voluntarily 

Him not voluntarily but spontaneously or es- 
sentially creative : creative not by any mere act 
of power but in Himself, or by the whole neces- 
sity of His being. His love is so truly infinite, 
as being utterly unlimited by self-love, that His 
creation amounts to an actual process of self- 
alienation, if I may be allowed the phrase ; so 
that in giving us being He necessarily gives 
Himself to us in the plenitude of His goodness 
truth and power. In a word according to Swe- 
denborg God creates us or gives us being only 
by thoroughly incarnating Himself in our na- 
ture ; but inasmuch as this descent of the crea- 
tor to creaturely limitations incidentally involves 
of course, on the part of the creature, the strictest 
inversion of the creative perfection, or a spirit of 
the utmost pride rapacity and tyranny, so it must 
itself necessarily provoke a corresponding ascend- 
ing or redemptive movement on God's part, giv- 
ing us spiritual extrication from this infirmity. 
Otherwise creation would remain utterly inoper- 
ative save in a downward direction. If God 
should simply give me natural substance or 
identity without at the same time insuring me 
spiritual form or individuality, I should remain 
like the animal forever unconjoined with Him 
spiritually, and immersed in sensual delights. 
Let us clearly understand then that the Divine 
operation in creation is made up of two move- 
ments: one strictly objective or creative, which is 
a movement of humiliation consisting in giving 
us natural being or identity ; the other strictly 
subjective and redemptive, which is a movement 



but spontaneously Creative. 397 

of glorification consisting in giving us the am- 
plest individual or spiritual expansion out of that 
base root. The prior movement — the descend- 
ing, statical, and properly creative one — gives 
us natural selfhood or consciousness, a con- 
sciousness of separation from God, of a power 
inhering in ourselves and independent therefore 
of Him. The posterior movement -— the as- 
cending, dynamical, and properly redemptive one 
— gives us spiritual consciousness, a conscious- 
ness of union with God, and makes us abhor 
and recoil from nothing so much as the spiritual 
filth of all sorts — the exuberant pride, inhu- 
manity, and concupiscence — which lies con- 
cealed in every motion of our moral power. 

Stated in more general terms, Swedenborg's 
doctrine practically amounts to this : that the 
creative operation in humanity is under a certain 
necessity imposed by its own perfection to put 
on a strictly historic guise ; or to struggle up 
from a natural root, through a rational stem, 
into a consummate spiritual flower. His meth- 
od of demonstration may be formulated in three 
propositions of surpassing philosophic breadth, 
to which accordingly I invite the reader's close 
attention, namely: 1. God's perfection is such 
that He cannot create life, but only communi- 
cate it; 2. It is of prime necessity therefore 
that a suitable form exist prepared to receive 
such communication ; 3. This form, thus ne- 
cessary to enracinate creation or separate be- 
tween creator and creature, must be itself nat- 
ural. 



398 God cannot create Life 

The general import of these three propositions 
makes it a fundamental exigency of the crea- 
tive perfection or infinitude, that its creature 
possess conscious or phenomenal existence, in 
order to his realizing the real or absolute be- 
ing he has in God. In other words he must 
possess natural identity allying him with all 
other existence, before he can realize that spir- 
itual diversity or individuality which alone allies 
him with God. 

But let us look at each proposition in de- 
tail. 

I. When we call God a perfect or infinite 
being, what do we mean ? We mean that 
He is Life, the sole life of the universe, life- 
in-Himself, uncreated life. This is what we 
mean when we call God a perfect being, or 
allege His eternity and infinity. We know 
that our own life is derived ; that we exist 
naturally and hence consciously only because 
our fathers have preceded us. But God has 
no father, being self-existent or uncreated, being 
in short Life itself. It is His express perfec- 
tion or infinitude that He is Life itself, there 
being no life in the universal orb which does 
not reflect His mediate or immediate pres- 
ence. 

Now it is just this perfection of God which, 
according to Swedenborg, shapes creation, or 
makes it precisely what it is to the experience 
of the creature, namely : not a mere display of 
brute omnipotence conditioned in space and 
time, but a process of rational growth or forma- 



but only communicate it, 399 

tion involving all space and all time within 
itself, and therefore never dominated but only 
served by them. For this perfection of God, 
this fact of His being Life itself, makes it 
impossible that He should create life. If He 
should create life, if He should summon into 
existence a being who should be not merely 
a form or subject of life, but life itself, then 
that being would be God ; and creature and 
creator consequently would be at eternal log- 
gerheads. God cannot create life therefore, 
since this would be contrary to His essential 
infinitude, but only communicate it. And as 
God himself is life, to communicate life to the 
creature means of course to communicate Him- 
self. Thus creation consists not in any creation 
of life, which is absurd, but altogether in a com- 
munication to the creature of that life which 
God already and unchangeably is : so that the 
creature is never life itself even within his own 
limits, but only and at most a form of life, a 
perfect form or image of life, a perfect organ or 
subject of life, into which the Divine Life in- 
flows and indwells as in Himself, communicat- 
ing His eternal power and beauty. 

II. Such being the law of the creative Per- 
fection, that it communicate life in place of cre- 
ating it, it is at once obvious that the creature 
must have a form of his own, must possess con- 
sciousness or be phenomenal to himself, in order 
not to be swallowed up in God. If the thing 
created should be without the form or appear- 
ance of being to itself; if it had no proper con- 



400 Before Life can be communicated 

sciousness, no indestructible identity to its own 
perception, how could it possibly be discriminat- 
ed or individualized from God when animated 
by Him ? Evidently the fundamental exigency 
of any creation we can recognize is, that the 
creature possess selfhood or conscious freedom 
and rationality : that he have at all events an 
apparent life in himself, in order to his being 
projected from God, and so prepared for that 
subsequent Divine influx and inhabitation in 
which alone his spiritual individuality, or im- 
mortal being, consists. It may be in itself the 
merest semblance of life ; it may be, as inwardly 
or spiritually beheld, full of death in fact : but 
to him the conscious subject it must appear the 
most absolute of realities, under pain of inval- 
idating every subsequent exhibition of the crea- 
tive energy towards him. 

Let us make sure that we clearly apprehend 
this point, for it makes all the difference between 
heavenly truth and infernal error. 

I say that the inexorable prerequisite of God's 
spiritual end in creation is, that the creature get 
extrication from the creator ; become posited to 
his own consciousness as a free being ; attain in 
short to an every way veracious selfhood. If 
the creature should not consciously exist ; if he 
should not possess finite form or selfhood, he 
would obviously be destitute of identity, could 
not be said to be, and neither creation nor any- 
thing else could be predicated of him. To 
create means to give being or communicate life 
to what assuredly is not oneself; and if this be 



a basis of communication must exist. 401 

so the creator is bound in order to impart His 
own being or communicate Himself to the crea- 
ture, above all things else to posit the creature, 
or afford him some adequate and veracious 
ground of self-consciousness. Thus selfhood, 
which is one's ability to feel one's life as one's 
own and not as another's in him, is the inex- 
pugnable necessity of creation ; inasmuch as 
without it there can be no conceivable commu- 
nication of life on the part of the creator, hence 
no creation. The creature must be absolutely 
and unchangeably himself must possess identity, 
or real and conscious distinction from his crea- 
tor : otherwise creation in any honest sense of 
that word must confess itself an unqualified 
sham, and tumble off into the bottomless abyss 
of Pantheism. 

If indeed the orthodox and vulgar conception 
of creation were true, which makes it a mere 
impromptu spurt of the Divine power, as essen- 
tially wanton or capricious as that whereby an 
idle horseman with a stroke of his whip lays 
low the head of an aspiring thistle, then we 
might conceive otherwise. Then we might al- 
low disorder to constitute the true order of crea- 
tion, without any shock to our intelligence, sim- 
ply because we could not possibly have in that 
case any intelligence to be shocked or unshocked; 
for intelligence means exclusively the perception 
of a Divine order in creation. But the ortho- 
dox conception as we have seen is irredeemably 
irrational or vicious, because reason insists that it 

does not fall within the scope even of Divine 
26 



402 Creation in order to be Real 

power to create life but only to communicate it. 
Life cannot be created because God himself is 
life : the sole, the total, the unchangeable life of 
all things that have life ; so that for Him to cre- 
ate life would be to create Himself, who yet is 
essentially uncreated. And it must be commu- 
nicated to the creature, so as to be in him as his 
own, before it can be enjoyed by him. Because 
unless it were so communicated ; /. e. made by 
the Divine bounty a common possession between 
Him and His creature : the latter must utterly 
fail to image his creative source, must remain in 
fact unconscious, insensate, inanimate, without 
any sign of being. The very marrow of the 
Divine perfection lies in this ; that He is life in 
Himself: and one instantly perceives therefore 
that an alleged creature of God who should not 
at least appear to have life in himself as well, 
feeling it to be his own and not another's in him, 
would manifestly be no image of God, and con- 
sequently confess himself no creature. If the 
creature were destitute of selfhood or identity ; 
if to his own perception at least he did not seem 
to be quite naturally, i. e. independently of any- 
thing beyond his own nature ; he would of 
course remain purely passive or inert to the 
Divine communication, and confess himself for- 
ever dead to the faintest breath of life. 

By the sheer necessity of the case, then, crea- 
tion involves in order to its own functioning a 
distinctively formative sphere of experience on 
the part of the creature, by means of which the 
creature who is Divinely vivified, may come to 



exafts Selfhood in the Creature : 403 

self-consciousness, to the formal recognition of 
himself as so vivified. Let us rather say that 
the creative nisus totally merges in this prelimi- 
nary process of formation, so that God actually 
creates or gives being to things only in so far as 
He first gives them subjective form. 

Such are the implied philosophic contents of 
our first two Propositions. I know very well 
how superfluous they will seem to the ordinary 
religious apprehension. The orthodox religion- 
ist has not the least idea of nature as a needful 
involution of God's spiritual operation in crea- 
tion ; that is, he has no idea of our natural cre- 
ation in the Divine image being requisite to 
base our subsequent spiritual and unimpeded 
conjunction with Him. He conceives that cre- 
ation was a purely superficial display of the Di- 
vine power, involving no rational method or 
order, implying no subjective or conscious dis- 
crimination of creature from creator, inferring 
in fact no interior physiology of any sort, but 
being a mere brute effect of lawless, irrational, 
unprincipled, irresistible might. Orthodoxy, or 
Natural Religion, conceives without a misgiv- 
ing that space and time are the real or infinite 
substances of the universe ; that they are modes 
of God's being, conditions of His consciousness, 
needful elements of His existence, as of ours: thus 
that there were aboriginally to His perception 
an infinite space where and an eternal time when 
creation was not : /. e. where and when He dwelt 
in awful inactivity. And it regards creation 
itself consequently, not as the munificent inves- 



404 -And hence claims to be a purely 

titure it really is, on God's part, of His depend- 
ent creature with His own infinite and eternal 
power and blessedness, but as the mere imple- 
tion of these idle gaping and loathsome wilder- 
nesses of space and time with their present fixed 
and movable contents, their existing mineral 
vegetable and animal furniture. Its conception 
is that what God creates or gives being to must 
be intrinsically void not only of being but of 
seeming; not only of substance but of form ; 
not only of objective reality but of subjective 
phenomenality : so that all pretence to separate 
the creature from the creator on the basis of a 
veracious natural selfhood becomes absurd, and 
his subsequent rise into moral, much more into 
spiritual, life or consciousness, confesses itself 
simply inconceivable and incredible. 

Thus the received orthodox idea is that cre- 
ation is a purely physical exploit of God where- 
by He makes all things out of absolutely no 
substance whatever real or fallacious : that is, 
out of pure nothing : by a simple fiat of arbi- 
trary volition ; and hence logically it turns the 
creature from a spiritual being capable of com- 
munion with his maker, capable of freely reflect- 
ing or reproducing in himself all Divine perfec- 
tion, into a graceless stock or stone without 
self-consciousness or visibility to others, without 
spirituality or corporeity, in short without one 
solitary feature of resemblance to the creator to 
rescue it from ghastly idiocy and death. 

To state these notions is to refute them. 
They belong obviously to the childhood of the 



Spiritual operation of God. 40 £ 

mind, the period of its subjection to the teach- 
ings of sense (symbolically, the serpent). Noth- 
ing does not and cannot exist. There never 
was a time when things were not, nor a space 
where they were not ; because things exist only 
to a rationally and sensibly finited intelligence : 
time and space being the mere universals of such 
an intelligence, its constitutional implication and 
attestation. It is thus supremely childish to 
cogitate creation as an incident of time and 
space, however brief or however protracted. If 
you allow it only this force you reduce it at 
once to actual nullity, or leave it only an ideal 
truth, by making it a mere phenomenon of the 
human mind. Space and time are really men- 
tal substances, having no other function than to 
compel all the objects of Nature and all the 
events of History into the compass of the hu- 
man form. In this state of things it is of course 
preposterous to imagine a space where and a 
time when creation did not exist, but was sum- 
marily mechanized into being. Scepticism is 
not only our reasonable service here, it is rigidly 
imperative upon every lover of truth. Not 
scepticism indeed, but the frankest possible de- 
nial, is properly incumbent upon every candid 
mind, with respect to these mere enfantillages of 
cosmological inquiry. The interests of the 
most sacred verity require that we begin at last 
to entertain worthier conceptions of the creative 
power : that we leave off looking upon creation 
as a momentary exploit of the Divine volition, 
and commence regarding it as an infinite and 



406 Orthodoxy turns Creation into 

eternal incarnation of the Divine Love and Wis- 
dom in all the varied forms of human nature. 
The Divine power is primarily spiritual, and 
natural only by derivation from that. In other 
words man is the sole spiritual creature of God, 
and animal vegetable and mineral are his crea- 
tures only by virtue of their necessary implica- 
tion in man. Thus space and time far from 
lying outside the Divine creation and furnishing 
its theatre as we suppose, fall most strictly within 
it, being only two most coarse or universal ex- 
pressions of the absolute unity in variety, and 
of the infinite variety in unity, which severally 
animate it, and keep it eternally fresh and fra- 
grant. In one word : space and time with all their 
contents are embraced in the human conscious- 
ness, and have no other function than to afford 
a finite basis, a fixed continent, for its superb 
spiritual evolution. 

Let us clearly understand then that creation 
of necessity, or in order to its own integrity in- 
volves a preliminary sphere of formation or re- 
demption, and that all our orthodox cosmologies 
are unspeakably puerile in a philosophic estima- 
tion, because they make no allowance for this 
necessity, but on the contrary persist in regard- 
ing it as a paltry tour de force on God's part, a 
mere wilful and extempore proceeding, without 
rational gradation or order. The first condition 
of intellectual progress for us is that we discard 
this antiquated travesty of the truth, and com- 
mence conceiving of creation as the giving be- 
ing by God to what has subjective or phenome- 



a mere physical Exploit of God. 407 

nal consciousness, to what necessarily appears to 
be in itself. Nothing does not exist, since all 
existence is made up of persons and things ; 
and to say that God gives being to what does 
not even to its own apprehension exist, or pos- 
sess at the very least a fallacious consciousness, 
is to leave no ground of discrimination between 
creature and creator, and to end by organizing 
a nauseous Pantheism. Nothing means on its 
face as in its bosom no-thing, non-existence. It 
means what neither is nor appears to be, what 
has neither being nor the semblance of being, 
neither substance nor form, neither real nor con- 
scious existence. All finite existence is of two 
kinds personal and real, moral and physical. 
Whatsoever transcends both of these categories 
is spiritual and infinite ; whatsoever falls below 
them is not to be conceived, does not exist, is 
no thing even. 1 To represent the Deity accord- 
ingly as creating or giving being to this pure 
nothingness, as imparting Himself to this abso- 
lute non-existence, is at once to make creation 
itself devoid of actuality by depriving it of con- 
sciousness. Consciousness as all experience wit- 



1 The word nothing means things, that they are destitute 
the logical negation of identity, not merely of consciousness but 
as being that which has neither of visibility to others, or do not 
inward substance nor outward enjoy even an apparent exist- 
form, neither real nor phenome- ence : and hence instead of be- 
nal existence, being in fact the ing rightly chargeable with good 
hopeless prorogation of both, and evil, are void of all con- 
To say then that God creates ceivable selfhood or identity, 
all things out of nothing, is vir- and hence out of all possible 
tually to say that the things thus relation to God forever, 
alleged to be created are not 



408 Whereas in truth Nature is but 

nesses cannot be outwardly imparted, but must 
in all cases be inwardly begotten, since it is not 
a simple or absolute possession of its subject, 
but a complex or relative one, being an invari- 
able term of relation between him and his na- 
ture. Consciousness always means the marriage 
fusion or unity of a common nature and a spe- 
cific subject of that nature. Accordingly selfhood 
or subjective existence, no matter how fallacious it 
be when regarded objectively, is the indispensable 
prerequisite of God's creative designs ; because 
the creature's identity, or conscious separation 
from the creator, by which the truth of creation 
is eternally vitalized — without which indeed it 
sinks into a contemptible farce — would be oth- 
erwise hopelessly confiscated. 

I have now said all that seems needed at pres- 
ent in elucidation of our First and Second prop- 
ositions, which together imported that inasmuch 
as creation consists not in the creation of life but 
only in the communication of it by the creator 
to the creature, it follows that the latter must 
exist in a form suitable to receive such commu- 
nication. 

III. Let us next examine our Third proposi- 
tion which runs thus : " The only form suited to 
give creation root or embodiment is of necessity 
natural: " being in fact the very form of Nature. 
Why should the created form be of necessity 
natural ? Why must it needs involve the rela- 
tion between a common nature and an individ- 
ual subject of that nature *? Why might it not 
be a purely spiritual form, i. e. retain the indi- 



a Mask of God's spiritual operation. 409 

vidual element and exclude the communistic 
one ? I shall try to make my answer full and 
clear. 

In the first place let me remind the reader of 
what it is that makes any form necessary to the 
creature, namely : the interests of his identity, 
which require his absolute formal discrimination 
from the creator. Creation as we have seen is 
nothing more nor less than a communication of 
life on the part of the creator to the creature. 
But manifestly this communication could never 
take place unless some basis exist adequate to 
its transaction; that is to say, unless some quasi 
or phenomenal life in himself be allowed the 
creature, in order to serve as the medium of the 
creative communication. Spiritually viewed 
creation means the eternal conjunction of crea- 
tor and creature ; but what sort of conjunction 
would this be, if the creature were without any 
identity, forever discriminating him to his own 
perception from the creator? Evidently no con- 
junction at all, and consequently no creation. 
The whole stress accordingly of the creative 
Providence is exerted to secure a permanent 
and ample base for creation, in endowing the 
creature with selfhood or subjective constitution. 
The interests of the creature's identity are ne- 
cessarily the prime care of the creative Love, its 
whole spiritual activity remaining contingent 
upon their being indestructibly guaranteed. In 
other words selfhood or consciousness in the 
creature is the altogether inevitable postulate 
of the Divine power in creation : everything 



410 The Creature's Identity the first 

being possible to it if that postulate be granted : 
nothing whatever if it be denied. It is not by 
any means the consummate flower and fruit of 
creation ; but only that rude incidental husk 
which gives bodily nourishment to the flower 
and fruit according to the demands of their in- 
ward nature: only that abysmal foundation in 
short or indispensable subterranean root, without 
which creation, spiritually regarded, could never 
either flourish or fructify. For it is obvious to 
a glance that if life were conferred upon the 
creature immediately by God ; if it were con- 
veyed to him by some direct exhibition of the 
Divine power, and without any constitutional 
reaction on his part; it would be nothing short 
of an imposition. And the creature in that case 
would be so far from any capacity to appropri- 
ate it, or feel it to be his own, that he would 
not be able even to perceive it. He would be 
less in sympathy with it spiritually than the 
stone is in sympathy with the genius of Shak- 
speare. 

The reader perceives clearly by this time, that 
what is exacted in the creature first of all is a 
form of existence which shall above all things 
unmistakably identify him, or eternally separate 
him to his own consciousness from God : since 
that very communication of life to him which 
alone, spiritually speaking, constitutes his crea- 
tion, is absolutely contingent upon such identifi- 
cation and perishes without it. 

But now if the reader see thus much very 
clearly, he will be ready to see still further : 






Care of the creative Love. 41 1 

that if the interests of the spiritual creation re- 
quire that the creature be at all discriminated in 
se from the creator, they require that he be so 
discriminated to the utmost possible extent, or 
to the point of utter antagonism : the infinitude 
of the creative power being contingent upon 
its bringing good out of evil, life out of death. 
Conscious antagonism to God is the inevitable 
implication of the created form. For the crea- 
ture being the unlimited dependent of God, it 
is evident that he must be in himself or abso- 
lutely, L e. to all the extent of his uncreation, 
so to speak, or phenomenal disjunction with 
God, the direct denial and destitution of what 
he becomes by his subsequent creation, or real 
conjunction with God. If the creature were 
not a creature, then I grant he would be God 
himself, infinite in all his attributes. But so 
long as he is a creature he must necessarily be 
in-himself — in that thing which separates him 
from God by giving him identity or defining 
him to his own consciousness — the exact and 
total opposite of God. The naked fact of his 
creatureship enjoins that he be in-himself or by 
uncreation, the total destitution of what he be- 
comes in God or by creation. This intrinsic 
destitution as we have seen is the inevitable 
mould or matrix of his subsequent Divine en- 
largement, of his eventual impletion with all 
Divine perfection. For as the law of the mould 
is that it present in itself the exact inversion of 
the thing moulded, it follows necessarily that 
the only form suited to inaugurate God's spirit- 



412 This Interest requires that he be 

ual kingdom, is one which shall exhibit not 
merely the absence of the Divine infinitude or 
perfection, but the intensest actual finiteness or 
imperfection. To sum up all in a word : an ex- 
act inverse ratio must obtain between what the 
creature is in himself or subjectively, and what 
he becomes in God or objectively ; between 
what he is by natural genesis merely, and what 
he subsequently becomes by spiritual growth or 
culture. Otherwise of course, his consciousness 
will lack a veracious basis, and perish like a 
plant cut off from its roots in the ground, or a 
house deprived of its foundation* 

Thus the reader perceives that if it be true 
on the one hand that God gives us being (cre- 
ates us) only in so far as he gives us form 
(makes us) : it is equally true on the other that 
the essential implication of the form thus given, 
is conscious contrariety to Himself; since no 
other consciousness than this would be suitable 
to base creation, by conferring on the creature a 
valid identity. 

Now what form of existence actually re- 
sponds to this inexorable requisition, actually 
presents an aspect so intrinsically hostile to the 
Divine infinitude, as makes it every way suitable 
to inaugurate creation, by affording the creature 
an indisputably valid basis of consciousness, a 
selfhood so inextinguishably his own, that for 
it he will cheerfully leave father and mother — 
L e. renounce his allegiance to infinite goodness 
and truth — and cleave to its fortunes through 
death and hell *? We shall see in one moment. 



an inverse Image of God's perfection. 413 

The perfection of God as we have already 
seen consists in His unity, that unity which 
makes all life to centre in Himself, and leaves 
Him consequently without any fellowship. His 
unity is so absolute as to exclude all community, 
and stamp Him the only One, the sole Living 
and True. Thus He is absolutely void of lim- 
itation, being perfect or infinite in Himself, and 
hence has no power of relation to others save in 
so far as He is Himself primarily and strictly 
creative of those others. His unity in short is 
made up of two elements, universality and indi- 
viduality : and it is an infinite or perfect unity, 
because, of these two elements the latter or indi- 
vidual and feminine one, involves or includes 
the former or universal and masculine one. 

Now obviously the only inverse form of this 
absolute unity of God is community, which is a 
relative or partitive unity, made up of its sub- 
ject's participation of a common nature with 
others, and shared equally by those others. 
Accordingly if we would lay our hand upon 
a form of life answering by inversion to the 
Divine infinitude or absoluteness (7. e. infinite- 
ly finite, absolutely relative, or perfectly imper- 
fect) we shall find it to be one in which the 
masculine or universal element involves and 
controls the feminine or individual element; 
that is to say, a form of life in which the subject 
is seen partaking a community of nature with 
others : this community of course limiting, as it 
confers, all his individual faculty and enjoyment. 

Now where shall we find any such actual 



414 Community the essence of Nature 

form of life, any style of life presenting this act- 
ual intrinsic inversion of the Divine perfection ? 
Manifestly Nature alone, what we call the 
natural form of life as contradistinguished from 
the spiritual, responds to our summons. Nature 
alone supplies that communistic quality of ex- 
istence which renders her a rigidly inversive 
analogy of the Divine existence, and so allows 
her to fix creation, to finite it or make it actual. 
Community is the very essence of nature, every 
natural subject being what he is only by virtue 
of his birth or derivation from others, thus by 
virtue of his participation of a strictly common 
nature with others. The subject of nature ac- 
cordingly instead of being infinite or perfect, as 
God is, in involving his own substance, is of 
necessity most finite or imperfect as finding his 
substance wholly without him, that is in his 
relations to others. In fact every natural sub- 
ject is but an organized form of want, all his 
natural appetites and passions being so many 
confessions, not of his subjective possession of 
anything, but of his objective destitution of all 
things, and hence so many unsuspected but gen- 
uine manacles of his servitude to outlying na- 
ture. Appetite and passion are the marks of 
an imperfect being, because they express not 
freedom but dependence, not wealth but pov- 
erty. God consequently is without these limi- 
tations, while man naturally viewed is wholly 
made up of them : the reason of the difference 
being that the former is essential freedom, the 
latter essential dependence. 



inversely images the Divine unity. 415 

Nature then affords that essential inexpug- 
nable basis — that indispensable and only ade- 
quate mould — of the Divine operation in crea- 
tion of which we are in search, in that she alone 
presents an inverse image of the Divine perfec- 
tion, and so becomes qualified to matriculate the 
created consciousness, or separate between crea- 
tor and creature. If she were a direct image 
(which is however a contradiction in terms) of 
the Divine perfection, all her subjects would of 
course passively reflect that perfection ; and 
consequently in place of any line of demarca- 
tion, any ground of discrimination, offering 
itself between creator and creature, the latter 
must inevitably have failed of his identity, must 
inevitably have forfeited all possibility of dis- 
tinctive character or personality : for what 
rightful property could the creature possess 
in his creator's perfection ? It is thus all sim- 
ply the fact of nature's intrinsic finiteness or 
imperfection which, being organized, fits her 
to be the exact and admirable matrix or vehi- 
cle of the Divine creation, and justifies Revela- 
tion in placing the true theatre of the Divine 
power on the earth, or identifying the unsullied 
Divine glory with the most despised dishon- 
ored and dispirited of human beings. 

We now see our Third Proposition to be 
fully justified, or understand why it is that the 
true form of the Divine creation is natural, 
since no other form could worthily matriculate 
the creature in affording him conscious separa- 
tion or projection from the creator. Nature 



416 Nature's sole funftion 

gives the creature conscious disjunction with-the 
creator, and hence makes possible any amount 
of subsequent spiritual conjunction between 
them. She posits the creature to his own per- 
ception as the exact and total opposite of God, 
so emphasizing or intensifying the sweetness of 
their eventual perfect intimacy and fellowship. 
This is very much to do no doubt ; it is a most 
indispensable part of the creative process, but it 
is evidently altogether preliminary. It is only 
the foundation of the edifice, and furnishes at best 
but an inverse hint of the unimaginable splen- 
dors of the superstructure. So long as the nat- 
ural consciousness dominates the Divine creature 
in the interests of his eternal identity, he lives 
to be sure, but it is an embryonic life : he has 
not yet come to spiritual birth, and is conse- 
quently destitute of that grandly human con- 
sciousness which is the consummate fruit of the 
creative operation. 

To sum up. The indisputable function of 
Nature, her inmost soul and meaning, is to fix 
creation, is to afford the creature indestructible 
identity by developing in him such an abject or 
unrelieved community with other things as shall 
stamp him intrinsically finite or imperfect, and 
so array him in implacable conscious antagonism 
to the Divine name. She alone supplies this 
adequate base to creation, because her essential 
communism affords so ample and ready an in- 
version of the Divine infinitude, as suffices to 
give both veracity and vivacity to the created 
consciousness, and thereby permanently separate 



to embody Creation. 417 

between creator and creature. She is thus a pure 
incident of the Divine creation; or if an end, a 
wholly mediate and transitional one ; her total ef- 
ficacy lying in the uses she promotes to something 
higher than herself, namely : a spiritual or strictly 
super-natural form of existence. In one word Na- 
ture is rigidly involved in man or the spiritual 
creation ; and instead therefore of herself involv- 
ing him, she does nothing but systematically and 
untiringly evolve him. 

Clear notions on this point are to the last de- 
gree important. Let my reader not fail to mark, 
then, that while nature's intrinsic finiteness or im- 
perfection unquestionably fits her for the great 
succulent or maternal relation she fulfils towards 
the creature — fits her to be the exact and admi- 
rable womb of creation — it also restricts her to 
this purely maternal or constitutive use, and cuts 
her off from any creative or originative pretensions 
towards the creature. She no more creates him, 
or gives him spiritual being, than the mother cre- 
ates the child, than the acorn creates the lordly 
oak which grows out of its tiny bosom, or the egg 
creates the soaring eagle which is born of its cor- 
ruption. Her function is a purely incidental one, 
fails strictly within creation proper ; being all 
summed up in fixing the creature, in giving him 
that merely maternal investiture or environment 
which shall consciously alienate him from God, i. e. 
make him another than God to his own conscious- 
ness ; and so qualify him for his subsequent eter- 
nal spiritual conjunction with God. She endows 
the creature with material form, but only as the 
27 



41 8 She incorporates Spirit. 

necessary basis of his true or spiritual being. She 
gives him root, so to speak, or mineral body : 
leaving his vegetative growth and animal motion, 
much more his human action, to a wholly oppo- 
site and infinitely superior source. She is thus 
only the lifeless scaffolding of creation, the base 
and abject mud of mere appearance, out of which 
God's true or spiritual creature, being inwardly 
quickened with all Divine power, emerges at 
last in faultless human proportions. In truth 
nature is but the requisite background of the 
human consciousness, the needful field of pro- 
jection which the Divine workman exacts, in 
order to adapt His creative skill to the created 
intelligence : it has no more title accordingly to 
be regarded as animating the work or giving it 
spiritual substance, than the canvas upon which 
Raphael painted has to be regarded as inspiring, 
or giving aesthetic substance to, Raphael's pic- 
tures. 






CHAPTER XXIII. 

Such is the broad philosophic light which 
Swedenborg interpreting Revelation casts upon 
the origin of Nature. It is an involution of the 
me exclusively ; an implication of the human 
form ; a necessity of man's subjective or literal 
identity purely, and has no other relation there- 
fore to the not-me, /. e. to his objective or spirit- 
ual being, than bricks and mortar have to a house, 
or a canvas to a picture. It furnishes him with 
finite constitution, with phenomenal or conscious 
existence ; and to that extent of course denies 
him infinite or absolute being : /". e. separates 
him from God. Nature is involved in man, 
spiritually regarded, just as the marble is in- 
volved in the statue ; that is to say, not as giv- 
ing it spiritual form or individuality, but only 
material substance or identity. As the marble 
gives phenomenal substance or relief to the 
statue, so Nature gives phenomenal substance 
or background to man : but she no more vivi- 
fies or creates him — no more endows him with 
individuality or spiritual being — than the mar- 
ble vivifies or creates the statue. Her indispu- 
table function is to finite the creature, to fix or 
identify him to his own consciousness, so for- 
ever separating him from God: in order that 



420 Nature's part in Creation 

God may thereupon spiritually in-finite him by 
conjoining him freely with Himself. 

Thus Nature plays an altogether subordinate 
part in the great drama of creation ; not a prin- 
cipal or controlling part, as Religion and Science 
conceive, but a purely accessory and instrumental 
one. Nature is the mother of the creature, giv- 
ing him finite existence merely ; while God 
alone is his father, giving him infinite being, 
immortal spiritual life as well. Nature is the 
convenient medium or hyphen which really or 
spiritually disjoins father and child, while ap- 
parently or literally conjoining them, by endow- 
ing the latter with her own finite substance. 
But this is literally all her virtue. She has no 
educative or vivifying efficacy over this still un- 
couth unconscious offspring of her own bowels. 
While her term of gestation endures, while man 
is still in embryo, being shut up to purely vege- 
table and animal conditions, the mother under- 
goes any amount of passive anguish, suffering 
at times intolerable nausea vertigo and syncope. 
And she releases him at last from her tender an- 
chorage with infinite amazement and agony to 
herself, only that she may see him grow away 
as rapidly as possible from every remembrance 
of indebtedness to her> and bring her in fact 
under abject vassalage to himself. 

The simple fact of Nature's being this purely 
incidental or mediatorial force, of her existence 
being a mere implication in a grandly human or 
spiritual end, empties her of all reality except to 
sense, stamps her with intrinsic insignificance, 






is purely Mediatorial, 421 

pronounces her in herself void of life, insensate, 
inanimate, unconscious, incapable of any con- 
ceivable characteristic. Accordingly when we 
see her to be actually brimful of life, teeming 
with consciousness, with sensation, with every 
form of animation, everywhere pervaded by 
character or distinctive form, fairly bristling all 
over with the fiercest self-assertion, we may be 
sure that these things originate not in her, but 
in something distinctly above her; i. e. confess 
no natural, but an intensely supernatural or spir- 
itual origin. And what Philosophy does for us 
— precisely what Philosophy, following the lead 
of Revelation, does for us in emancipating us 
from the tutelage both of Natural religion and 
Natural science — is, so to trace back this exu- 
berant life of Nature, her pervasive conscious- 
ness, her corrosive personality, her endlessly di- 
versified character, to the very infinitude of the 
Divine power as embodied and illustrated in 
Man social and spontaneous, as infallibly to dis- 
perse all doubt of her origin forever, and engage 
both science and faith, both reason and sense, in 
boundless adoration. 

Nature's existence is implied in man as the 
foundation of a house is implied in the super- 
structure ; because man alone avouches himself 
the true end of creation, inasmuch as he alone 
livingly images or reproduces God's spiritual 
perfection, in finding his principle of action 
within himself, and denying at his maturity all 
outward constraint and obligation. The human 
form regarded as directly vivified or inhabited by 



422 Nature is implied in Man as 

the Infinite is of that rich and sovereign make, 
that it involves in itself every lower form of na- 
ture mineral vegetable and animal ; presupposes 
in fact, as its own subjective basis, the entire uni- 
verse of space and time with all their contents. 
We cannot help conceiving of the Divine work 
as thus culminating in man, because man is the 
only spiritual being we know. To rob creation 
therefore of its strictly human crown would be 
to reduce it to an abjectly physical process, con- 
sisting at best in giving the creature natural ani- 
mation, or investing him with rational soul as 
well as sensitive body, while the interests of his 
immortal spiritual individuality were wholly left 
out. 

Of course it is inevitable that as all the forms 
of Nature are thus involved in the human form, 
the due and perfect evolution of the latter should 
have been postponed to the necessities of the 
former; that the principal should remain for a 
long time obscured by the accessory; that the 
inexperienced traveller in fact should be tempo- 
rarily blotted out and buried under the weight 
of his own superincumbent baggage, so that it 
takes millenniums to disengage him and put him 
on his proper feet. But Nature infallibly fulfils 
her office in the long run, being prompt to con- 
fess the pervading presence of a great spiritual 
force which we call History or Progress. His- 
tory perfectly explicates the implicit contents of 
Revelation, by bringing out in clear ineffaceable 
lines the inextinguishable difference between 
man and all other known existences. It shows 






the Body is implied in the Soul. 423 

us that man has an individuality which is mani- 
festly disproportionate to his nature, while theirs 
is in every case a rigidly proportionate endow- 
ment ; a faculty of aesthetic or ideal action and 
passion, to which there is nothing whatever in 
them either similar or second. Let me dwell on 
this for a moment. 

The reader knows that it would be supremely 
silly to talk of an individual animal's "genius" 
as we do of an individual man's, say Shakspeare's 
or Franklin's. Why? Because the animal is 
utterly servile to his natural instinct, and hence 
perfectly devoid of that power of distinctively 
individual action which we call genius in man, 
and which as it excludes a physical derivation 
confesses of necessity a purely spiritual sub- 
stance. The animal knows no happiness but in 
abject submission to his nature, in orderly sub- 
jection to all its appetites and passions. Man 
on the contrary by an instinct of his paternal 
infinitude, of his direct derivation from God, so 
resents the pretension of his nature to control 
him, that he rushes madly into the jaws of hell, 
into all manner of disorder disease and death, 
rather than tolerate it for a moment. The ani- 
mal is alike incapable either of elevation into the 
angel or of degradation into the devil ; simply 
because he is an animal or living soul, without 
being at the same time like man a quickening 
spirit; and having no claim therefore to that 
distinctively human capacity of freedom, of 
which angel and devil are only the positive and 
negative poles. Every man on the contrary in- 



424 History means the Vindication 

eludes in his bosom the highest heavens and the 
lowest hells, or the profoundest possibilities both 
of good and evil, simply because he is man : 
i. e. because the unqualified divinity of his 
origin emancipates him from the control of his 
nature : the devil being the direct or negative 
and disorderly form of such emancipation ; the 
angel its indirect or positive and orderly form. 
The slow but sure vindication then of the 
human form in creation or of the supremacy of 
Man over Nature, is what is meant by historic 
progress. History means the gradual extrication 
of the human consciousness from its natural or 
maternal environment, in order to its complete 
unimpeded union with all Divine perfection. 
The precise historic issue aimed at and accom- 
plished is, such a thorough separation (through 
the activity of the Divine spirit in human na- 
ture) of the individual, spiritual, or feminine 
element in consciousness, from the merely com- 
mon or natural and masculine element ; and 
then such a thorough reduction of the latter to 
the spontaneous subserviency of the former ; as 
will amount practically to a perfected society 

OR FELLOWSHIP AMONG MEN '. which fellowship 

or society accordingly avouches itself as the in- 
most scope and meaning of man's Providential 
destiny on earth ; the one supreme and only 
interest in which every man whatever be his 
internal or spiritual distance from other men, 
stands indissolubly united with his race, and 
may become to the fullest degree a voluntary 
and zealous co-worker with God. 



of the Human Form in Creation. 425; 

Formation is thus the grand philosophic secret 
of creation ; the grand controlling interest of hu- 
man destiny. To find the true and adequate form 
for the creative substance, for the infinite Divine 
influx and indwelling, constitutes in fact the very 
mould of the intellect, and the measure of its 
perfect enfranchisement. By the necessity of his 
creation man is a composite or social existence, 
not a simple or isolated one. He is created, as the 
symbolic narrative of creation in Genesis attests, 
both male and female. Now when we talk of 
what man is by creation, we mean of course 
what he is in God. For God alone creates him, 
or gives him being ; whatsoever therefore he is 
by creation, he is exclusively by virtue of the 
Divine Perfection. But being implies exist- 
ence ; substance implies form. That is to say, 
whatsoever the creature is by creation, he is 
bound also to become by formation; whatso- 
ever he is in God, he is bound to bring forth in 
himself; under penalty of leaving creation a 
mere figure of speech. If then by creation 
man be not a simple but a composite existence ; 
if the creative Perfection itself require that he 
be not a solitary but a social being ; it follows 
of course that his very form as man, all his expe- 
rience of himself, his inseparable self-conscious- 
ness, must reflect this necessity. His proper 
life or selfhood must in order to his imaging 
God involve two movements, one statical, the 
other dynamical, and constitute their unity. 
That is to say, his existence must be both natu- 
ral and spiritual, both common and proper, both 



426 Adam, a Symbol of the Celestial, 

public and private, both universal and particu- 
lar, both generic and specific, both broadly iden- 
tical with all other existence, and yet intensely 
individual and distinct from it. 

Adam, before the birth of Eve, pictures to us 
what man is by creation merely ; an eternal in- 
fant, incapable of growing in love and wisdom 
and power, because he is without selfhood, or 
personal experience ; without any experience of 
himself, and consequently without any possibil- 
ity of spiritual reaction towards — and spiritual 
conjunction with — his infinite source. Were 
we not made then as well as created ; did not 
God give us finite existence as well as infinite 
being; the coarser or masculine element of our 
consciousness, the universal element or element 
of identity which unites us with our race, would 
so dominate and absorb the finer feminine ele- 
ment, the element of individuality, which unites 
us with God, that we should have been animals, 
not men, or remained mere stunted nurslings 
of God's assiduous Providence. Thus creation 
philosophically involves formation ; requires 
that the creator not only give being to the crea- 
ture — which He does by the communication 
to him of His own spiritual substance or perfec- 
tion — but also that He give him form : that is, 
a power to react towards this communication, to 
expand to it, receive it, appropriate it, make it 
his own, reproduce it in his own life and action. 
In other words creation legitimately implies that 
whatsoever the creator be in Himself become 
actually wrought out to the last gasp within the 



Eve, of the Natural, Mind. 427 

creature's proper consciousness ; become intelli- 
gibly formulated within the strictest bounds of 
the creature's own experience; that so he may 
spiritually react towards the creator, and that 
fellowship or conjunction consequently take 
place between them, which alone is immortal 
life. 

Revelation confirms this philosophic induc- 
tion, by reporting Adam — who in the symbolic 
Genesis represents the merely created or celestial 
man — as without self hood ; as the mere passive 
creature of the Divine power, the mere passive 
recipient of Paradisiacal delights : for Adam 
there was not found a help-meet for him. With 
Eve accordingly, who symbolizes his Divinely 
vivified selfhood, Adam's proper personal expe- 
rience begins; or the negative innocence of 
childhood prepares itself to be taken up into the 
positive innocence of ripe and wise manhood. 
I say "prepares itself," for Eve, though she be 
an indispensable and invaluable acquisition to 
Adam, fails for a time to avouch that fact very 
clearly. In other words, the selfhood in man, 
Divinely quickened in his bosom, is spiritually 
inexpert and ignorant, being dependent at first 
of course upon sense (symbolically, the serpent) 
for all its knowledge ; and sense, though a very 
good servant, is a very stupid master. Sense 
has no perception of infinite but only of finite 
substance; thus of good as limited by evil, of 
truth as limited by falsity, of beauty as limited 
by deformity, of pleasure as limited by pain, 
and so forth ; and it consequently persuades us, 



428 Man knows himself at first 

in spite of every sacredest tradition we may 
have heard to the contrary, that to eat diligently 
of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is 
the one infallible method of becoming wise. 
The innocent tender babe, who sees heaven laid 
bare to its imagination in the fragrant pastures 
of its mother's bosom, has for a long time no 
wink of recognition to bestow upon the wrinkled 
paternal visage which is making all sorts of 
mendicant signals to it over the maternal shoul- 
der. Exactly so with the innocent new-born 
Eve of our bosoms, our tender God-quickened 
selfhood. We know ourselves at first only 
on the mother's side, only as identified by Na- 
ture, being altogether cradled in her lap, and 
nursed on her generous breasts; and what can 
we know without larger experience, what can 
we livingly know, know except from tradition, 
of our higher paternity *? Manifestly nothing. 
We have, and can have, no ear but for the sub- 
tle and sweet and succulent invitations of sense, 
nor consequently any doubt of becoming like 
God in diligently cultivating a finite righteous- 
ness, which means, seeking to be good by right of 
nature, instead of Divine right exclusively. Thus 
the first and highest possible service which Eve 
renders Adam is to throw him out of Paradise : 
/. e. strip him of the innocence which he has 
by creation merely, and which consists only with 
ignorance of his proper self, in order finally to 
clothe him with the innocence which he will 
have by virtue of a Divine redemption of his 
nature, and which is one with the profoundest 



only as Sensuously defined. 429 

wisdom, or experience of selfhood. This is 
the mystery of that toil and sorrow which are 
to lift man's earthly or outward life to an equal- 
ity with his celestial or inward life ; of those 
long-protracted pangs of intellectual labor, which 
ultimately bring forth a Divine fruit in the natu- 
ral plane of the mind no less than the spiritual. 
In fine here lies the beginning of our social 
culture and discipline ; of that persistent untir- 
ing devoted struggle on the part of the spiritual 
element in life — on the part of the woman 
within us — to satisfy the craving of her stolid 
material mate after infinite delights, which is the 
meaning of all history, and which is Divinely 
prospered and fulfilled only in the social destiny 
of man. 

This is the secret of Swedenborg's unequalled 
services to Philosophy, that he turns creation 
from an event in time and space antedating 
knowledge, and therefore totally uninteresting 
to human belief, into a most orderly develop- 
ment of our own historic consciousness ; into 
an intimate outbirth of our own associated ex- 
perience ; turns it in fact into a most tender, 
protracted, and at last successful, wooing and 
consequent marriage, of the human by the Di- 
vine nature, in which no interest of the weaker 
party is overlooked or sacrificed, but on the con- 
trary every interest is unswervingly respected, 
maintained in honor, and infinitely promoted. 
He reduces the orthodox conception of creation, 
as an event in space and time, transacted over 
our heads and without our intelligent privity, to 



43° Swedenborg compels Creation 

absurdity, or self-contradiction, because it makes 
the creature a mere will-of-the-wisp, by robbing 
him of soul, of selfhood, of that natural identity 
or fixity which alone is competent to base his 
spiritual individuality. Selfhood or identity is 
a composite not a simple fact. That is to say 
it is a fact of the strictest consciousness, imply- 
ing the marriage of a common nature with a 
specific form. No form exists which is wholly 
unconscious or inanimate, though of course con- 
sciousness itself assumes infinitely diversified 
aspects : here a very diffuse and lethargic one, 
as in the mineral form of existence ; there a 
very concentrated and energetic one, as in man : 
but in all its forms alike it announces the union 
of a common or identical substance with a spe- 
cific or individual form. 1 



1 We think the mineral exist- violence to our own. But nev- 
ence unconscious, because it is ertheless by translating our nega- 
so remote a form of consciousness tive human experience into the 
from ours, that we can hardly re- positive mineral one, or inter- 
produce it. But if we should preting the intense and indeed 
accidentally fall from the roof agonizing moral revolt we feel 
of a house or any equal height, under the circumstances, by the 
and be unfortunate enough to sur- mere experience of inertia — or 
vive, we might by afterwards re- abandonment to the overpower- 
calling to remembrance the sen- ing force of gravitation — which 
sation we felt during the fall, the mineral feels, we shall be 
make an approximate estimate able to compass a near view of 
of the mineral consciousness. Of the mineral consciousness, or pic- 
course we should have known it ture to our intelligence the state 
only in inverted and most revolt- of anaesthesia or drunkenness — 
ing form : because as our per- i. e. nearly utter submergence ot 
sonality alienates us to the great- individual sensibility in a sense 
est possible extent from the min- of diffused existence — which 
eral consciousness, we cannot characterizes what we very ab- 
come into the conditions of that surdly call inorganic nature, or 
consciousness without the utmost brute matter. 



into the Limits of Consciousness. 431 

Selfhood then or existence utterly refuses to 
be conceived of as created, in the sense vulgarly 
attributed to that word, i. e. as denoting an out- 
ward exhibition of Divine power; because it in- 
variably implies or presupposes the parentage of 
a common substance and a specific form. What 
sheer childishness to conceive of a tree, or a 
horse, or any other natural object, having been 
created by an arbitrary fiat of some superior 
power, and without the implication of a natural 
generation ! But how absolutely shocking to 
conceive of moral existence as so created ! It 
utterly outrages the truth of things to conceive 
of character, personality, as outwardly derived 
or conferred. Characteristic or personal exist- 
ence is free existence ; and freedom always 
means — unless it be employed as it frequently 
is to express simple jail-delivery or emancipa- 
tion — the power of an inward life ; that is, the 
union of an inward object and an outward sub- 
ject. 

Three sorts of freedom or life are known to 
us, each of which alike resolutely disowns an 
outward origin : 1 . Physical or passive freedom, 
of which instinct is the symbol, and which con- 
sists in doing whatsoever the heart pronounces 
good : /'. e. in having all the passions and appe- 
tites of one's nature in due or normal exercise : 

2. Moral or active freedom, whose symbol is 
will, and which consists in doing whatsoever 
the intellect pronounces true, even if it should 
contradict what the heart feels to be good : 

3. Spiritual or essential freedom, whose badge 



43 2 Both our Identity and our Individuality 

is spontaneity, growing out of the reconciliation 
or marriage of good in the heart with truth in 
the understanding, and which consists accord- 
ingly in the total harmony of one's outward life 
with one's inward aspiration : /. e. in one's being 
precisely what one wishes to be, and seeming 
precisely what one is. These are the three uni- 
versal modes of what we call freedom, selfhood, 
life, consciousness, in man ; and it is obvious to 
a glance that each alike repugns the least out- 
ward dictation. You may indeed obstruct the 
manifestation of this freedom under any of its 
forms. You may by your conscious or uncon- 
scious tyranny debar it its due and adequate' ex- 
ercise: but you can neither give it nor take it 
away. It is God's own life in the subject, the 
enticing, endearing, ravishing Eve whom God 
alone quickens within him, radiant flesh of his 
flesh, most intimate bone of his bone ; and he 
cleaves to it accordingly with a tenacity which 
makes it comparatively easy to renounce father 
and mother; /. e. turns the sacredest traditions 
of Church and State, when they set themselves 
against it, into empty or at best mercenary 
clamor. 

Creation then considered as a physical proced- 
ure of God, as a work executed in space and 
time, is an unmitigated absurdity. Physical 
creation, which is the making one's being to 
derive from one's flesh and blood, or the ma- 
king one's nature the ground not only of his 
identity or conscious existence, but also of 
his individuality or unconscious life, is tan- 



are mere Masks of God's Presence in us. 433 

tamount in conception to the exhaustion of 
the creator by the creature : the giver being 
inevitably finited in se by his gift, the receiver 
z/z-finited in se. Being is identical or one with 
itself. To suppose one being therefore out- 
wardly conferring his own being upon another 
spatially and temporally distant from himself, 
is to allege the former's diminution in the exact 
ratio of the latter's enlargement. God's being 
is inseparable from Himself; is His perfection 
or character ; so that in creating or giving be- 
ing to another, He simply communicates Him-- 
self to that other. Thus both our natural self- 
hood or identity (considered as the base), and 
our spiritual individuality (considered as the 
superstructure, of God's work in creation), con- 
fess themselves mere transparent masks of the 
Divine presence in us : the one being that gor- 
geous many-colored visible temple of His abode, 
whither all the tribes of the earth go up to 
worship : the other that invisible holy of holies, 
where He dwells unapproached and unsuspected 
save by those alone who have been spiritually as 
well as naturally quickened, and who render 
Him consequently no ritual but an exclusively 
living devotion. 

28 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

What will our existing religion and science 
say to these things ? Neither of them is likely 
to admit with any too-ready complacency, that 
neither our finite nor our rational parts, neither 
our bodies nor our souls, neither our substantial 
identity with, nor our formal diversity from, 
all other existence, has the least basis outside of 
consciousness. Yet the truth is philosophically 
indisputable. Body and mind are both alike 
an unceasing spiritual communication — a per- 
petual living operation or miraculous creation 
— of God in our nature. It is manifest that God 
cannot create anything, cannot make anything be, 
save in so far as He communicates Himself to 
it. And just as evidently He cannot communi- 
cate Himself to anything, save in so far as the 
thing be previously adapted to the communica- 
tion, be a form receptive of the communication. 
Now God being Himself the all of life, it is 
clear that the only form of life answering to His 
life or imaging His perfection, must be a com- 
posite or social form, must be as the good book 
alleges, both male and female : /. e. unite in 
itself the two elements of universality or iden- 
tity and individuality : so that creation spirit- 
ually regarded amounts to this, namely: such 



The Problem of Creation 43 j 

a restless and resistless motion of God's spirit in 
the depths of human nature, as will finally issue 
in a perfect society, fellowship, or brotherhood 
among men, in which whatsoever belongs to the 
collective life of its members shall receive the 
unfaltering allegiance of the individual life ; and 
whatsoever belongs to the individual develop- 
ment of its members shall receive the unfalter- 
ing sustenance of the collective interest. 

Neither religion nor science conceives of crea- 
tion in this orderly plight ; as this infinitely ten- 
der, solicitous, and reverential condescension of 
the Divine spirit to every abject need both of 
our common nature and our specific form. Re- 
ligion is vitalized by sense, and sense affirms 
without misgiving the proper infinitude of Na- 
ture. Science is vitalized by reason, and reason 
affirms without misgiving the proper absolute- 
ness of Man. Neither of them dreams that 
God Himself is so intimately and vitally present 
both in Nature and humanity, as to challenge to 
Himself exclusively the infinitude and absolute- 
ness which they reveal. You are sure therefore 
to affront sense and reason, faith and science, 
with equal poignancy, when you deny the in- 
finitude of the natural, and the absoluteness of 
the moral consciousness, by affirming that they 
both alike possess in themselves no objective 
but a purely subjective validity. Let us pause 
here a moment. 

The problem which creation presents to the 
eye of the mind is this : How shall that 
which is intrinsically void of life — whose very 



436 The Incapacity of Faith and Science 

nature is not-to-be save in so far as being is per- 
petually given it by the bounty of another — 
attain to consciousness : i. e. to any such actual 
separation from its creative source as all self- 
hood implies, and is rationally indispensable in- 
deed to its own experience of existence % What 
is selfhood ? It is the feeling of life within 
one as one's own — that is, the feeling of one's 
proper infinitude — to the entire extent of one's 
natural identity; the feeling of life within one 
as one's own — /. e. the feeling of one's proper 
absoluteness — within the limits of one's rational 
individuality. Manifestly then existence or self- 
hood cannot be arbitrarily imposed, or outwardly 
conferred upon its subject by the will or the act 
of another, even if that other be God ; but 
must be an inward or bosom experience of the 
subject bred of the strictest truth of the case, 
and reflecting such truth exclusively. 

Here then is the hopeless bewilderment, both 
of faith and science, to reconcile this finite cre- 
ated selfhood with the infinite creative substance; 
or disconnect the omnipotent fountain with the 
derivative and utterly dependent stream in a 
manner so thorough, as shall insure their ever- 
lasting harmony by making it impossible that 
the former shall ever pinch or prove penurious 
to the latter, the latter ever swallow up or sup- 
plant the former. For if the strictest truth of 
the case give a created subject ; then inas- 
much as it is the nature of created things to 
be void of life in themselves and to depend on 
others for it, the created subject so given will be 






to solve the Problem of Creation. 437 

able to attain to consciousness or the experience 
of existence, only so far evidently as the creative 
Love gives it natural organization : i. e. vivifies 
its intrinsic death or destitution of life, by the 
communication to it of His own immortality. 
And what right have either faith or science to 
anticipate Philosophy (which alone intelligently 
avouches the Divine infinitude) by alleging any 
such resources in the creative Love as qualify 
it to meet this exigency of the created nature ? 
Evidently not the least right. The sole basis 
of faith is sense, and sense drowns the infinite 
in the finite. The sole basis of science is rea- 
son, and reason drowns the absolute in the rela- 
tive. Both faith and science consequently, so 
long as they are uncontrolled by Philosophy, 
are totally unable to conceive the creative 
infinitude, and hence to suggest any such re- 
sources in Deity as alone suffice to account 
for creation. They are both alike prevented 
from formulating any doctrine of creation, 
by their omission to see in Nature the only 
thing which summons her into being, and jus- 
tifies her apparition, namely : her unqualified 
subserviency to a higher life than her own ; 
her absolutely indispensable uses to our social 
or spiritual manhood. They both alike con- 
cur in regarding Nature as the direct and fin- 
ished product of creative power, so making 
the spiritual world, which is the universe of 
the human mind, fall within Nature, in place 
of making Nature fall exclusively within it. 
In these circumstances one of two fatalities 



438 Atheism or 'Pantheism 

impends : either the human mind, outraging its 
own profoundest instincts, must decline into 
Atheism, so denying creation altogether ; or 
else, outraging its own invincible rationality, 
must accept Pantheism, so turning creation in 
any honest undebauched use of the term into a 
derisive will-of-the-wisp, or morbid exhalation 
of human fatuity. For evidently if we admit 
the Divine existence at all, then inasmuch as its 
very perfection — that which constitutes it Di- 
vine in a word — consists in its unity, in its be- 
ing the all of life, it is irrational to conclude that 
there should be any other absolute existence. 
Derivative existence is in itself and of necessity 
simple zero, utterly formless and void, void both 
of inward substance and outward seeming, void 
in short of all identity and all individuality. 
Whatever it has of either of these things it 
can have only apparently in itself, and really in 
God. Absolutely therefore there can be no such 
form of life as the natural one : i. e. a form of 
life bearing so inverse an aspect towards the 
Divine infinitude, as to be entitled thereupon to 
a distinctive consciousness : and the unenlight- 
ened reason of man consequently stands aghast 
before the problem of the natural creation ; be- 
ing compelled to reject it honestly and outright 
by a profession of Atheism, or else to attempt 
circumventing it by a timid Pantheistic solution. 
For if such forms of life as are here contemplat- 
ed do not and cannot exist absolutely or of 
themselves, and yet do actually exist to their 
own consciousness in the greatest profusion, 



Necessarily results. 439 

then the inference is clear, that this actual ex- 
istence of theirs is involved in some higher 
form of life, i. e. is owing to some virtue of 
the creative Love, which Science is impotent 
to discover by the light of reason (though 
most competent to appreciate when discov- 
ered), and which Philosophy therefore, follow- 
ing the light of Revelation, brings to our 
knowledge. 

Let my reader bear with me, if I seem to 
linger on this topic. I am sure his intellectual 
advantage will be consulted, if we perfectly es- 
timate the part Religion has played in our intel- 
lectual evolution. 

Religion exacts no strictly human or creative 
perfection in God, because it takes Nature as 
given in sense, /. e. as a final and not as an 
instrumental, achievement of the Divine om- 
nipotence ; as a result, and not as a process 
towards a result. It looks upon Nature as a 
substance in her own right * as an end, not 
as a means to an end ; as a finished gem rather 
than the crude ore which embeds the gem ; as 
being herself God's true creature, rather than 
the purely material and maternal investiture, 
by which the creature becomes built up and 
identified to his own consciousness. Science 
gives her no furtherance in this career, but only 
impediment. Science does nothing but exalt the 
concept of the finite as given in sense, into that 
of the relative as given in reason ; so completing 
an intellectual basis for that rich demonstration of 
the Infinite in the finite, and of the Absolute in 



44° God is bound to give His Creature 

the relative, which Philosophy will ultimately 
enact. Philosophy becomes able to throw a 
commanding light upon the origin of existence, 
only by heeding the voice of Revelation, which 
turns Nature from a principal into a mere acces- 
sory of the Divine creation ; from the creature 
itself into a wondrous and exquisite mould of 
the creature. Until Philosophy come therefore 
to avouch and fulfil the intellectual promise both 
of religion and science, the human mind will 
be seen on the one hand declining, under the 
auspices of what calls itself Positive Science, 
into the helpless drivel of Atheism ; on the 
other, under the patronage of German idealism, 
which is what now passes for Philosophy, into 
the stuck-up and conceited waiting-maid of Pan- 
theism. 

For how is it conceivable upon the data of 
reason, which in the absence of Philosophy are 
absolute over religion, that Nature should exist 
at all: that is, that there should be any actual 
form of life answering by antagonism to the Di- 
vine perfection : while yet the very possibility 
of consciousness suspends itself upon such exist- 
ence ? It would be easy enough doubtless for 
us rationally to conceive how — a suitable form 
being already extant or provided to the Divine 
hand, as clay is provided to the potter — the Di- 
vine life might inflow, and fill it with His own 
bliss to eternity. But no such form is provided 
to the Divine hand. The Divine skill is bound 
to give its creature conscious form as well as 
unconscious being or substance : is bound not 






Consciousness as well as Being. 441 

only to vivify the creature with His own vital 
spirit, but also to invest him previously with 
that unmistakable natural selfhood or identity, 
which shall make such vivification a valid fact 
of experience, an actual fact of history, and not 
a despicable figure of speech or verbal juggle. 
It is as if the potter should himself give being 
to the clay out of which, as well as conception to 
the form into which, his work is moulded. If 
any such creative relation as this on the part of 
the potter to his clay existed, the figure he moulds 
would be no longer artificial, that is, devoid of 
natural life or consciousness, but would on the 
contrary glow with self hood. 

Clearly then the only thing that saves cre- 
ation from the odious slaver of Pantheism, 
the only thing that makes its flowing waters 
musical, and keeps its wandering breezes for- 
ever sane and sweet, is the ineffaceable truth 
of the creature's identity under whatever inten- 
sity of the creative influx and inhabitation. In 
himself, or naturally, the creature is but a form 
or image of Life, dependent every moment for 
all that he is and all that he enjoys upon the 
unstinted communication of that Life. Obvi- 
ously therefore unless he present on his natural 
or maternal side a complete inversion of the 
creative perfection, nothing can guarantee the 
reality of creation ; nothing can hinder it turn- 
ing out an abject stifling sty of Pantheism. I 
say this is obvious ; because, as we have seen, 
if the created form should exhibit any direct 
analogy with the creative substance, all basis 



44 2 *£he inevitable Implication 

of discrimination would be lacking between 
itself and the inflowing Divine life ; and with 
that of course all faculty of self-recognition, all 
possibility of consciousness. The sole possible 
basis of identity for the creature, the only con- 
ceivable ground for attributing distinctive char- 
acter or selfhood to him, lies in his being in 
himself a direct contrast to the creator : empty 
where He is full, impotent where He is omnipo- 
tent, ignorant where He is omniscient, evil where 
He is good. Did he not possess this formal con- 
stitutional identity, were he not by nature the 
characteristic well-defined opposite of all Divine 
perfection, he could not possibly be a proper 
object of the creative Love : since the very dis- 
tinction of that Love, regarded as infinite or 
pure of all infirmity, is that it is utterly void of 
self-love, having no respect to any worthiness in 
its object but what grows out of the object's 
utter want. It is no doubt very tolerable finite 
or creaturely love to love one's own in another, 
to love another for his conformity to oneself: 
but nothing can be in more flagrant contrast with 
the creative Love, all whose tenderness ex vi ter- 
mini must be reserved only for what intrinsically 
is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself 

The truth cannot be otherwise. So long as 
God creates or gives being to the creature only 
by unreservedly communicating Himself to him, 
He must do so in a way not to overpower the 
creature or rob him of his proper identity, but 
on the contrary must allow him to expand to 
the rankest luxuriance of his nature. He is 



of the finite Consciousness. 



443 



bound to allow all the evil and falsity which 
exist potentially in the created nature to come 
to the surface, to come to the creature's con- 
sciousness by becoming actual : otherwise the 
creature must forever remain destitute of dis- 
tinctive consciousness. When this conscious- 
ness is perfect ; when the creature truly perceives 
the imperfection he is under by nature ; when 
by an actual experience of life he perceives him- 
self to be prone to all manner of iniquity ; he 
becomes spiritually disengaged from his natural 
foundations, exchanges his native pride and ob- 
duracy for modesty and docility, and inwardly 
looks up to God for help. He is now no longer 
a mere abject creature of God, but his sympa- 
thetic associate or fellow ; no longer a servant, 
but a son. 1 



1 If I were by nature good 
instead of evil, 1 could not dis- 
tinguish between the Divine 
good and my own, for all good- 
ness is one : nor consequently 
exert the least spiritual grasp or 
appropriation of the inflowing 
Divine life, in which appropria- 
tion nevertheless my creation 
rigidly consists. In short, if I 
were good by nature and not by 
culture exclusively, good by gen- 
eration and not by the strictest 
regeneration, good in myself or 
finitely as well as in God or infi- 
nitely ; then good could never 
attract my aspiration, could 
never provoke my emulation : 
for no one aspires to what he 
already possesses, nor emulates 
that in another which reminds 



him only of himself. Of course 
all this evil in the creature is 
properly an incident of his natu- 
ral consciousness merely, and 
has no manner of pertinency to 
his spiritual creation. It is a 
fact purely of his subjective con- 
stitution, pertaining to him only 
on his finite phenomenal side : 
and has no relation whatever to 
his spiritual individuality or the 
objective being which he has ex- 
clusively in God. It character- 
izes him as still uncreated so to 
speak, as still destitute of his 
true spiritual and Divinely-given 
form ; and has no more relevan- 
cy to his perfected development 
than the umbilical cord of the 
foetus has to the memory of" the 
full-grown man. 



444 Science is but a Bridge between 

But if Religion be incapable of hinting a 
philosophy of Nature, science labors under a 
greater disability even. For science has had a 
purely negative function with respect to relig- 
ion ; and it is only by sheer self-conceit on her 
part or a gross misconception of her proper sub- 
ordination to Philosophy, that she is ever tempt- 
ed to reconstruct the ancient faiths by giving 
them a rational basis. Her whole business on 
earth, or in the evolution of the human mind, 
may be thus formulated : the gradual exhaus- 
tion or draining off of religion as a doctrine 
of Nature, in order to its permanent resuscita- 
tion by Philosophy as a life of Man. In other 
words the church as it has hitherto existed in 
purely typical or isolated institutional form, will 
disappear in the progress of our scientific cul- 
ture, only to reappear as a perfect human society 
or fellowship, animated and held together by no 
doctrinal consensus of any sort on the part of its 
members, but by their cordial unforced and filial 
acknowledgment of the Divine Name as alone 
adequate to explain the stupendous marvel and 
mystery of Life. The office of Science accord- 
ingly in this great work of social reconstruction, 
is that purely of a pioneer clearing the ground 
of the wild undergrowths of sense, or turning it 
up to the influence of light and air, and so pre- 
paring it for the endless beneficent inseminations 
of Philosophy. Men of science constitute the 
corps of sappers and miners, who with glittering 
axe on shoulder and stout leathern apron before 
them, precede the advance of the grand army 



Religion and Philosophy. 445 

of humanity, to batter down every fortress of 
organized error, bridge over every ditch of su- 
perstition, and drain off every marsh of conven- 
tional prejudice, which threatens to impede its 
victorious footsteps. 

Thus the office of science in our philosophic 
renovation, though most honest and indispensa- 
ble, is yet plainly negative not positive. Her 
whole business is to undo the shackles which 
sense imposes upon the religious instinct: so 
leaving it eternally free to soar according to its 
inmost spiritual aptitudes : by no means to re- 
place them with the far weightier because infinite- 
ly more impertinent fetters imposed by reason. 
For if the forms of Nature do not and cannot 
exist of their own right, and yet do actually 
exist in universal measure, it is clear that the 
secret of their origin is quite as impenetrable to 
Science as to faith, to Reason as to sense, and 
must even more hopelessly elude those who con- 
fide in her conceited oracles : for he is far like- 
lier to prove a wise man in the long run, whose 
negations are fed by his beliefs, than he whose 
beliefs are starved upon his negations. The 
truth is that Nature owes her origin exclusively 
to the proper infinitude of God's love as that 
love is displayed in Man : and Science dealing 
only with the finite and relative, willingly aban- 
dons to Philosophy the task of avouching the 
Infinite and Absolute. 

Such is the exact formula of our mental evo- 
lution as a race : Religion, Science, Philosophy. 
These are so many comprehensive symbols to 



446 Formula of our Mental History : 

our intelligence of the gradual development of 
the human form in creation ; of the orderly and 
complete extrication of the human mind from 
the bondage of nature and the tyranny of cus- 
tom. They mark so many successive stages of 
our gradual formation or redemption out of the 
utter vacuity and imbecility which we have in 
ourselves or naturally, into the perfectness of 
knowledge goodness and power which we have 
in God, or spiritually : first the blade, then the 
ear, and afterwards the full corn in the ear. Our 
intelligence begins in sense ; because being crea- 
tures — that is, being destitute of life in our- 
selves — we cannot possibly have any intuition 
of life, but must be gradually educated to its 
perception. Our grasp of it can never be abso- 
lute, but is always and of necessity empirical. 
Consciousness always identifies us with the out- 
ward and finite ; unless therefore the infinite and 
eternal life we have in God actualize itself to 
our consciousness, by coming down to our very 
senses, it can never be appropriated by us ; and 
thus might better have remained unheard of. 
The highest truths of the mind, which are those 
of the Divine infinity, eternity, and omnipotence, 
are bound first of all to seek and find ratification 
in the lowest plane of the mind, which is sense, 
under penalty of being excluded from the men- 
tal circulation altogether, or confessing them- 
selves no organic parts of the mind. The 
dogmas of a purely literal or physical creation 
redemption and providence, house these great 
spiritual substances until the race is sufficiently 



Religion, Science, Philosophy. 447 

quickened to discern them in their own lustre : 
so that unless our intelligence had had a prelimi- 
nary initiation into the mysteries of wisdom by 
this rude cradling, it would have remained for- 
ever incapable of the slightest spiritual appre- 
hension. In a word the very inmost and most 
celestial heights of experience in man grow out 
of, and are irreversibly tethered to, his lowest 
sensuous consciousness. 1 

In themselves however these literal dogmas 
are nothing more than a cradle for the intellect, 
or constitute a purely initiatory form of mental 
development, since they all proceed upon the 
postulate of a strictly physical creation, and re- 
gard Nature herself as the proper image of God. 
In this state of things God is of course practi- 
cally conceived of as the most finite of beings ; 
/. e. as involving the most of space and time in 
his existence : thus as a being of boundless 
physical dimensions, of transcendent material 
substance and majesty : all the visible types of 
nature lending themselves with equal alacrity 
to avouch His qualities. The fury of the tiger, 
the gentleness of the lamb; the subtlety of the 
serpent, the innocence of the dove; the splen- 
dors of light, the terrors of darkness ; seed-time 
and harvest, summer and winter, the cradle and 
the grave, the fruitful field and the barren waste, 

1 The highest seraph accord- some gross enveloping cuticle in 

ingly, whatever be the miracle which he and the clod are equal- 

of his endowments, must always ly at home : joint pensioners of 

exhibit some point of contact the same impartial bounty, chil- 

and sympathy with the lowest dren of the same exuberant and 

clod : must always acknowledge indiscriminate magnanimity. 



448 Natural Religion is bound 

the modest valley and the frowning mountain, 
the devouring fire and the vivifying heat, the 
gentle rains and the devastating floods, all alike 
furnish apt indisputable emblems of the Divine 
sovereignty, and suggest by turns to the devout 
imagination the wildest hopes of His personal 
goodness, or the most frenzied fear of His per- 
sonal malignity. Natural religion is thus the 
citadel of superstition. It is the acknowledg- 
ment of a power in Nature superior to nature, 
yet spiritually commensurate with all her pro- 
cesses and productions. It makes Nature the 
adequate temple of God, and bids us expand 
before His benignity in the sunshine, or cower 
before His malignity in the tempest. In short 
it affirms the absoluteness of Nature; her literal 
sacredness as a Divine revelation ; and conse- 
quently wherever its influence is unimpeded by 
a scientific reaction of the faculties, or a salutary 
scepticism of the intellect, it plunges its votary 
into grovelling fetichism ; making him worship 
a literal Divine good in the lasciviousness of the 
bull, a literal Divine truth in the venom of the 
snake. Were not science at hand accordingly 
to relieve the deadly blight thus operated by re- 
ligion upon the faculties, and so prepare the way 
to a philosophic recognition of creation, the in- 
tellect would expire of inanition, and human life 
die out in despair. 

We may say then that Natural religion — 
which is the acknowledgment of a Divine 
power immediately present in Nature, and di- 
rectly operating her effects — is bound as the 






to give way to Science. 449 

intellect of the race matures to give way to sci- 
ence, which declares that God is present in Na- 
ture only mediately, or operates her effects solely 
through the instrumentality of man. 

For erelong the contents of the senses become 
sifted, and the intuitions of the individual reason 
give place to the sober and orderly methods of 
science, or associated observation. Light be- 
comes gradually divided from dark in knowl- 
edge, good from evil, substance from shadow, 
reality from appearance, truth from fact. And 
it is precisely in this critical or sceptical power 
of the mind that science consists. At her fullest 
she is a mere disintegration of natural religion, 
or what is the same thing, a remorseless refuta- 
tion of Nature's absoluteness in the interests of 
human freedom. And the method she takes 
therefore from her very inception, is, to exhaust 
Nature of personality or life by proving her 
rigid subjection to law; that is, demonstrating 
the universality of cause. She gradually demon- 
strates the pure relativity or rationality of all 
natural forms ; so denuding them of that abso- 
lute prestige which they wear to sense, and 
which alone justifies the ascription of a Divine 
authority to them. Nature is now discovered 
to be far more potent to the imagination in gross 
than in detail, being totally unable to vindicate 
to the analytic reason the overpowering attitude 
she puts on to sense, or the carnal reason. In 
short, the senses are now seen to be hopelessly 
superstitious ; so that science, in place of affirm- 
ing their testimony, is bound as she grows more 
29 



45° But Science herself has no 

familiar with existing order, incessantly to re- 
prove and correct it. Thus the ruby, the rose, 
the horse, the grass, the water, when privately 
interrogated, or viewed apart from the over- 
whelming natural identity to which each in its 
degree contributes, confess themselves lacking 
in that strictly moral or individual force of which 
Science is in quest under all her researches, and 
which she regards as the highest or absolute 
form of natural existence. They one and all 
proclaim themselves forms of use not of life ; 
phenomenal forms not substantial ones ; forms 
of servitude in truth not of freedom ; and hence 
however imposing they may be to sense, they 
instantly lay off all prestige of Divinity to the 
reason. 

Thus science renders the great intellectual 
transition between Religion and Philosophy 
possible, by gradually refuting the sensuous 
judgments of the mind in regard to creation, 
or proving them superstitious. It gradually 
divests Nature of the rigidly fixed or finite 
character which sense ascribes to her, and in- 
vests her with a supremely rational or orderly 
significance. Sense takes for granted the essen- 
tial finiteness of all existence. It supposes the 
horse to be the horse in himself, and irrespec- 
tively of his relations to other existence ; the 
sheep the sheep, and the rose the rose, in them- 
selves and without reference to the relation of 
unity they bear to the rest of Nature : it sup- 
poses that pleasure is pleasure in itself and irre- 
spectively of pain, light light irrespectively of 



Pretension to Finality. 451 

dark, bitter bitter irrespectively of sweet, good 
good irrespectively of evil, high high irrespec- 
tively of low, and so forth : so that Natural 
Religion which is the child of sense by Faith, 
in order to conceive of Divine things has only 
to intensify these finite existences indefinitely. 
Reason however antagonizes sense. It denies 
the essential finiteness of natural existence, by 
affirming its strictly rational character; inasmuch 
as everything that exists does so only by virtue 
of its implication in other things. But then, 
although it denies finiteness to natural things 
by thus endowing them with an exclusively 
relative character, it goes on itself to make this 
relative character of all existence absolute in 
God's sight, so affirming a purely rational or 
moral Deity. Reason conceives that the differ- 
ence we see between horse and rose, between 
pebble and mountain, between high and low, 
light and dark, good and evil, bitter and sweet, 
painful and pleasant, are absolute differences, 
characterizing God's vision as well as ours. It 
consequently reorganizes religion upon a purely 
rational basis ; making it reflect no longer the 
wholly arbitrary natural divisions which sense 
alleges between opposing families and races of 
men, but those subtler personal or relative dif- 
ferences which exalt one man above another, 
and which imply the greatest possible indi- 
vidual merit and demerit in the Divine sight. 
If science consequently had the least legiti- 
mate pretension to furnish the final evolution 
of the mind, or, what is the same thing, if 



45 2 She is nothing more than 

reason should constitute the true basis of inter- 
course between God and man, hope would be 
limited in the human bosom to the lowest or 
most conceited persons ; /. e. to such as could 
most easily assure themselves of their own 
superior merit to others; while despair would 
be the lot of all those whose natural modesty, 
or cultivated sweetness, might lead them to 
prefer others to themselves. A scientific re- 
ligion indeed, that is to say, a religion which 
claims exclusively rational sanctions, is a philo- 
sophic absurdity. It may be tolerated as a 
criticism upon established superstition ; but 
it will never succeed in enlisting the disinter- 
ested respect, much less the enthusiasm, of its 
followers ; because it subjects the heart to the 
inspiration of the head, and makes worship a 
prompting of duty rather than affection; an 
affair of the lips and not of the life. 

Science is thus — although she herself does 
not suspect the fact, and is consequently very 
nearly as arrogant and absolute in her pre- 
tensions, as Religion had previously been in 
hers — is thus nothing more than an indispens- 
able middle-term between Religion and Phi- 
losophy : being negatively related to the for- 
mer interest, and positively related to the latter. 
Religion accounts for creation by a simple 
hypothesis, the lawless character of the Divine 
will : it makes creation a mere passive or brute 
display of Divine force. Philosophy exacts a 
composite hypothesis to explain it. It makes 
creation a strict ratio or mean between two 



a Handmaid to Philosophy. 453 

extremes, or alleges the indissoluble unity of 
infinite and finite in every fact of existence. 
Science accordingly, as the bridge of transition 
from one to the other, is bound, first, to chase 
God out of Nature (so relating herself nega- 
tively to Religion) by, secondly, bringing Na- 
ture itself within man, (so relating herself 
positively to Philosophy). For Philosophy 
considered as the culmination of our intellect- 
ual progress means the conversion into life of 
whatsoever has hitherto been merely doctrine; 
thus it implies the decease of religion in natu- 
ral form and its revival in spiritual form ex- 
clusively; or its disappearance as a truth of 
nature and its subsequent and sole worthy res- 
urrection as a life of man. Philosophy is a 
demonstration of the Infinite within the finite, 
of the Absolute within the relative ; but this 
demonstration will be perfect of course, only 
in so far as the finite and relative have been 
previously ascertained by an analysis of Nature 
so thorough and unsparing, as shall forever sup- 
press all doubt upon the subject. Now science 
is the instrument of this analysis. Its most 
concise and most comprehensive definition is 
the research of the Relative within the Finite. 
It is the child of Natural Religion, and comes 
into the world hearing its parent say, God cre- 
ates all things : an infinite presence subtends 
all the facts of Nature. With no misgiving 
Science sets out upon the search after this re- 
puted infinite whom all nature attests, but finds 
it nowhere. Nature exhibits absolutely no trace 



454 Philosophy alone has Power 

of it whatsoever. On the contrary the footsteps 
of the Finite abound everywhere excluding the 
infinite ; and to trace these footsteps home soon 
becomes the sole solicitude of science. This 
home is found only in moral existence, that is 
in man. The human form sums up all the 
relativity of nature ; exhibits the unity of all 
her opposites; moral existence being the only 
truly rational or unitary form of existence sci- 
ence is able to discover. What science sees 
in nature accordingly is never God but man; 
that is to say, it decrees the universality of law 
or order throughout the entire realm of finite 
life, and the consequent exclusion of the infinite; 
thus making it incumbent upon Philosophy to 
give the religious instinct a higher intellectual 
evolution, or else leave it barren forever. 

Philosophy accordingly stands ready when 
science has finished her critical or negative 
function, to assume the positive office to which 
the latter has proved herself plainly incompe- 
tent, that, namely of reconstructing religion, or 
putting it on a permanent because living basis. 
Philosophy denies the absoluteness which sci- 
ence under the guidance of reason ascribes to 
personal existence, by resolving the personally 
good and personally evil man quite equally 
into a higher aesthetic unity, consummate fruit 
of the Divine operation in human nature : so 
vacating the only imaginable ground of a sci- 
entific religion. For if persons be not absolute : 
if, as Philosophy affirms, the personally good 
man is not really but only apparently good of 



livingly to reinstate Religion. 455 

himself, and the personally evil man only appar- 
ently and not really evil of himself — both the 
good of the one and the evil of the other re- 
ferring themselves wholly to the contrasted rela- 
tion in which they severally stand towards a 
third or superior neutral and unitary form of 
manhood — then clearly no merit can attach to 
the one in the Divine sight and no demerit to 
the other; and the responsibility which reason 
ascribes to them, instead of being absolute, turns 
out a mere provisional necessity of our imper- 
fect social development. Thus it is only as we 
become socially and aesthetically posited that we 
exhibit, according to Philosophy, that perfect 
fusion or marriage of good and evil in a new and 
Divinely-given personality which is absolutely 
our own, and which therefore becomes an all- 
sufficient basis for any amount of spiritual inter- 
course and sympathy between us and our Ma- 
ker. 

Human history then has preeminently a sub- 
jective significance ; has primarily a formative 
scope and intention. Its purpose is to bring 
man to a proper acquaintance with himself, and 
so to induct him into a true knowledge of God ; 
to make us conscious in the first place of the 
divinity which is astir in our own nature, and 
then and thereby make us capable of recogniz- 
ing God as He is in Himself. Now religion 
which is the instinctual essor of our perfected 
intelligence, the earliest or nascent stage of our 
mental history, is the heart of the mind, and 
holds its head and feet, or the two factors of our 



456 Religion is the Heart — 

perfected consciousness, God and Nature, in 
chaotic solution : only because the subsequent 
scientific extrication of these latent quantities 
from each other's grasp, and their eventual phil- 
osophic reconciliation in a new and unitary 
form of life, are precisely what will constitute 
the entire mental growth of the race, the sum 
total of its intellectual consciousness. Religion 
confounds infinite with finite, God with nature, 
spiritual with carnal, only for our sake, or be- 
cause the gradual scientific disentanglement and 
subsequent philosophic distribution of these quan- 
tities in a living or harmonic consciousness, are 
what will constitute our complete spiritual crea- 
tion. Thus even as the kingly oak is wrapped 
up in the humble acorn upon which the swine 
feed and are fattened, the endless intellectual 
development of man is all contained by antici- 
pation in the bosom of his most sensuous Faith ; 
in those most rude and crude and general dog- 
mas of a literal Divine creation redemption and 
providence which constitute not only the best 
theology, but for a long time also the only sci- 
ence of the race. The very possibility of intel- 
lect would have been defeated, unless the mind 
had been husked in this primitive dogmatic 
drapery : unless every interest of its eventual 
majestic unity had been previously met and 
formulated — had been previously gathered up 
and stored away, so to speak — in these rude 
germs, these tough theologico-scientific roots, of 
a literal or physical Creation, Fall, and Redemp- 
tion, of man: the first term vindicating the 






Science, the Lungs — of the Mind, 457 

infinite paternal element in our consciousness, 
God ; the second, the finite maternal element, 
Nature ; the third, that perfect eventual recon- 
ciliation which these antagonist elements are 
to undergo in the Divine Natural Man, or the 
bosom of our perfected consciousness. Intellect 
altogether consists in the ability to separate what 
is superior in knowledge from what is inferior : 
what is rightfully prior and commanding, from 
what is rightfully posterior and subordinate : and 
if accordingly such separation had taken place 
without our scientific privity, or in advance of 
our intellectual consciousness, we should obvi- 
ously have lacked all mental fecundation, have 
remained forever void of intellect, cut off from 
the pith and marrow of our rational personal- 
The evolution of science succeeds that of re- 
ligion, because science furnishes the necessary 
body to the mind, the indispensable mother- 
earth upon which its feet are planted ; while 
religion constitutes its animating soul, the ca- 
ressing atmospheric heavens which encircle its 
head. 1 Science is the research of organized or 
relative existence ; and her empire consequently 
includes within itself the entire realm of the 
outward and finite, whatever is embraced in the 
universe of sense. As we have called religion 
the heart of the mind, we may call science its 
lungs ; her function being to separate what is 
private, spiritual, infinite in knowledge, or the 
mental circulation, from what is public, material, 

1 See Appendix, Note H. 



458 Science purges Religion 

finite : so preparing the former for that practical 
supremacy which is to accrue to it under the 
regime of Philosophy. Science arterializes the 
blood of the mind, which is knowledge, by di- 
vesting it of the deciduous attributes it gathers 
from sense. Her office is to spiritualize or fresh- 
en the mental circulation, by exalting its venous 
blood, which is sensible experience, into arterial 
blood, which is rational belief. Sense exhibits 
life to us so stripped of its rightful infinitude, so 
drenched of its essential divinity, as to make it 
very nearly vapid and worthless. It holds soul 
and body, substance and form, spiritual and ma- 
terial, in such inverted relation, as to give the 
lower element immense advantage over the high- 
er; as practically to aggrandize it indeed beyond 
measure, and give it infinitude. Nature is not 
God's true creature, which is Man, but only the 
mould of that creature. Accordingly if the 
physical element in consciousness, the element 
of identity, should permanently dominate the 
spiritual element, its element of individuality, it 
would in the end altogether consume and oblit- 
erate it. Science obviates this fatality by shift- 
ing knowledge from a sensuous to a rational 
basis, in demonstrating that creation is not a 
product of blind force, or arbitrary will, but of 
consummate order or law. If science did not 
thus assiduously purge the mental induction of 
the impurities it gathers from sense, all these 
vicious things must be incessantly restored to 
the circulation, not to impart health and joy and 
peace to the mind, but ever-growing irritation, 



of its Sensuous Sediment. 459 

disease, and death. Science accordingly elimi- 
nates from knowledge this sensual sediment, this 
garbage of the gutters, which it derives from 
our spiritual immaturity, in order that being 
thus aerated and defecated it may no longer pull 
down and destroy the mind, but renew it with 
immortal youth. In short her whole business is 
to convert sensible knowledge into rational be- 
lief, facts of sense into truths of reason, and so 
keep unimpaired that discrimination of high 
from low, of heaven from earth, of God from 
nature, upon which the reconciling mission of 
Philosophy is absolutely contingent. 

Philosophy is the completed or living form 
of the mind, its presiding cerebral unity, its ner- 
vous quickening spirit, which perpetually em- 
powers both heart and lungs, and compels them 
into her own strictest allegiance. Our true 
life or consciousness lies in the perfect union of 
infinite and finite. It is the marriage-fusion or 
unity of elements which, in themselves or intrin- 
sically, are so discordant and unequal, as to be 
incapable of combining directly, and are conse- 
quently held together only under the coercion 
of some third or neutral power. 1 Philosophy, 
then, as representing our consummate intellect- 

1 True or spiritual marriage the wife. Jf the parties to a 

never takes place between equals, marriage were strictly equal, 

but on the contrary always al- i. e. unisexual, there would be 

leges a hierarchical distribution no prolification ; because prolifi- 

of the parties to it, such as is cation implies not the equilibri- 

imaged in the Atomic theory, um of its constitutive elements, 

and is legalized in the institution but their most intimate and vital 

of civil marriage, which gives fusion, 
the husband social priority to 



460 Philosophy the Brain of the Mind. 

ual development, our complete mental unity or 
personality, has it for her exclusive business to 
coordinate these conflicting elements, or har- 
monize Religion and Science, God and Nature. 
This she does by sublimating religion or giving 
it infinitude, as having exclusive reference to 
what is spiritual in life, or regulating the rela- 
tions of the individual soul to God; and by 
precipitating science, or giving it bounds, by 
relegating it exclusively to the care of our 
social interests, or those relations between man 
and man, and man and nature, which alone 
express, alone embody, and alone empower, the 
relation of the individual soul to God. Phi- 
losophy is thus that veritable firmament or ex- 
panse in the midst of the waters, which separates 
the waters that are under the firmament from the 
waters that are above the firmament. Unless 
this separation had taken place : unless religion, 
which is the doctrine of God in Nature, and 
science which is the doctrine of Man in Nature, 
had been first perfectly discriminated and then 
perfectly reconciled in Philosophy, which is the 
doctrine of the God-man or of infinite and finite 
in complete union, we should either have been 
forever void of intellectual consciousness, and 
remained the filthiest of filthy aborigines to the 
end of the chapter; or else have become so in- 
flated with the pride of a superficial intelligence, 
as to lose erelong the tradition of a common 
human heart. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

But we must hurry to a close. 

The abstract formula of our mental growth 
as a race, which we have just been considering, 
namely: Religion. Science, Philosophy : would 
be worthless, if it did not translate itself into 
the facts of our visible experience, or authenti- 
cate itself by every actual detail of human his- 
tory. What we call history is only an instinctive 
effort of the common or associated mind of the 
race, to put on form, to come to self-conscious- 
ness, to realize its own majestic unity, by means 
of the purchase afforded it in the experience of 
the individual bosom. And as this great ten- 
dency formulates itself to our apprehension in 
the three intellectual symbols just cited, so of 
course history as the expression of such ten- 
dency, as the product of this interior mental 
evolution, must exhibit a form in exact corre- 
spondence with them. 

In point of fact this is what history does. 
History is all summed up in the three great 
interests of Church. State, and Society: or the 
ecclesiastical, the political, and the social life of 
man: the first representing his barbaric aspect, his 
religious consciousness, which posits him as a 
proper subject of nature, full of essential ego- 



462 History summed up in the Interests 

tism and rapacity, and therefore at an infinite 
remove from God ; the second representing his 
civic aspect, or his rational mind, which posits 
him as a moral subject under law to his fellow- 
man in consequence of such egotism and rapac- 
ity ; the third alone representing his truly human 
aspect, or his perfected philosophic conscious- 
ness, which posits him as a member of a perfect 
society or brotherhood, and hence emancipates 
him from any obliged allegiance either to church 
or state, by putting him in the frankest practical 
amity, in the intensest living or spiritual unity, 
with God and his fellow-man. 

In other words the entire machinery of man's 
destiny on earth, consists in that well-known du- 
plex movement of the Divine Providence which 
we summarily denominate church and state or 
religion and politics : the former a descending or 
centrifugal movement, the latter an ascending or 
centripetal one ; the one giving us death, the 
other affording us a quasi or temporary redemp- 
tion from it : but both alike tending permanent- 
ly and irresistibly to generate and coalesce in a 
third or orbicular movement which we call so- 
ciety, and which glorifies them both beyond 
their heart's desire, because it carries them both 
out infinitely beyond their individual promise 
or aspiration. The Church stamps man as nat- 
urally corrupt and infirm by virtue of his finite 
constitution ; the State thereupon subjects him 
to personal discipline and correction, by virtue 
of his rational consciousness : Society alone pre- 
sents him absolved alike from natural infirmity, 



of Church, State, and Society. 463 

and moral reproach, by the joint unstinted fel- 
lowship of God and his kind. History we may 
say then is the skin of the mind, its ultimate tis- 
sue or common covering, binding in one its sev- 
eral viscera of heart, lungs, and brain : Church, 
State, and Society being the outward forms 
under which this great unseen trinity of powers 
stand cloaked and represented. 

History, it is evident, owes its supernatural 
character, its controlling power over Nature — 
whatsoever distinguishes it from mere natural 
growth and decay — in a word owes its strictly 
human and progressive quality, to the truth of 
man's most unequal parentage : to the fact of his 
being the joint and equal offspring of an infinite 
father (God), and a finite mother (Nature). One 
sees at a glance that an infinite thesis and a finite 
antithesis entail a wholly unexampled synthesis ; 
and man's destiny accordingly is never to be 
gauged by stupidly nor yet conceitedly ignoring 
its major premise : which nevertheless is what re- 
ligion and science habitually do. The truest and 
most comprehensive formula of History is, that 
it is the persistent and at last successful effort of 
the paternal Divine element in consciousness to 
assert its essential primacy, and reduce the merely 
constitutive, or maternal natural element to its 
just subordination. History exhibits the nat- 
ural, maternal, or constitutive element in cre- 
ation, succumbing and giving way to the 
demands of the paternal or creative element, 
to such an extent as that what is strictly indi- 
vidual and human in life becomes finally 



464 I fs practical Scope is to free 

extricated from the grasp of what is common 
and animal, and permanently endowed with its 
more or less complete supremacy. It shows us 
human life turning out a ceaseless process of elim- 
ination or rejection, by which every trait of re- 
semblance to the infirm natural mould becomes 
gradually changed, into an image of the infi- 
nite spiritual substance from which both mould 
and form proceed. It represents the evolution 
of the creature's destiny, or his natural forma- 
tion in the Divine image, as a graduated or 
composite movement, first downward or radical, 
giving him fixity by developing in him the in- 
tensest consciousness of community with his 
kind; then upward or educative, giving him 
the utmost spiritual expansion out of that root. 
Our natural history may be defined in fact to be a 
pure process of redemption, or spiritual formation, 
consisting first in giving us conscious finite ma- 
ternity, but only in order that that consciousness 
may prove rigidly and unalterably ministerial to 
our conscious infinite paternity. Hence a literal 
cosmogony is philosophically bound, in order to 
symbolize and vindicate the eternal truth of cre- 
ation, to present it in this strictly orderly aspect: 
that is to say, is bound in the first place to posit 
an all-enveloping chaos or maternity ; and then 
to exhibit the successive extrication of the true 
Divine creature from this carnal confinement or 
embodiment, through all the stages of mineral 
existence or body, vegetable growth and animal 
motion, up to the full evolution of the human 
form in which creation culminates and closes. 



Eve from the Domination of Adam. 465 

Thus Nature is the mother of the creature, 
giving him requisite finiteness or body ; just as 
the marble may be said to be the mother of the 
statue, as giving it visible incorporation or fixity. 
But what would you think of a statue which was 
conspicuous chiefly for its material, or for the 
part its mother played in it ? What would 
your estimate of the statue be, if the substance 
out of which it was fashioned challenged more 
attention than the plastic power of the sculptor 
over that substance *? Would you not at once 
pronounce it faithless to the fundamental canon 
of Art, which is the supremacy of form to sub- 
stance? Unquestionably. For Art — viewed 
as the distinctively feminine evolution of human 
activity, in which freedom supplants force, or 
what is spiritual, individual, private, governs 
what is natural, common, public — makes Na- 
ture as furnishing the material in every work, 
purely ancillary and subservient to the Artist as 
furnishing its form, under penalty of defeating 
the work or rendering it imperfect. 

Yet precisely this is the fatuity of the distinc- 
tively religious mind, that it allows the inferior 
physical element in consciousness to dominate 
the superior psychical element; so that practi- 
cally the influence of the finite mother is om- 
nipotent over the offspring, while that of the 
infinite father is compelled into the rudest vassal- 
age. Religion, and our ordinary slipshod science 
as well, habitually interprets my spiritual individ- 
uality by my natural identity, or makes my soul 
to derive from my body; just as if you should 
3° 



466 // exalts our natural Communism 

attribute the statue to the marble and not to the 
sculptor. Undoubtedly the marble gives sub- 
stance or body to the sculptor's conception ; but 
no one dreams that it also gives form or soul 
to that conception. On the contrary it is ha- 
bitually pliant to the sculptor's demands, and 
abjectly receives whatever form he wishes to 
impress upon it. So precisely with my natural 
identity, or the consciousness I derive from Na- 
ture. It is the pliant marble merely upon which 
the Divine artist stamps the image of His spir- 
itual perfection. It gives visible body to the 
creative conception, but it no more animates or 
gives it invisible soul, than the marble animates 
the statue. I may, it is true, be physically dis- 
eased to the extent of rendering me idiotic, or 
defeating my spiritual possibilities. But clearly 
this is not the rule. The rule is that my physi- 
cal constitution serve as a mere pedestal or basis 
to my spiritual enfranchisement ; and if the rule 
be inoperative in any case, the result is in no 
way attributable to Nature's obduracy, but only 
to that contented myopy — with respect to 
God's presence in our nature — into which un- 
happily we are all more or less betrayed by the 
prevalence of a superstitious faith and a sceptical 
science. 

When the common people interpret creation 
as a making " all things out of nothing," what 
is their meaning ? I do not ask their conscious 
meaning, for this is pretty sure to be wrong ; 
but their unconscious meaning, which is pretty 
sure to be right. They mean to say that God 






into the intensest Individuality. 467 

alone gives being to man naturally no less than 
spiritually : that the very nature of the creature 
is such as to deny him being, so that if he be 
created at all, his nature itself is to be redeemed 
or overcome in the first place. The nature of 
the creature as a creature is not to be, just as 
that of the creator is to be : so that so far as his 
nature is concerned he is absolutely nothing : 
without form and void of substance. His na- 
ture is to derive all his being from another; to 
be absolutely incapable of life in himself. If 
therefore he have conscious existence or self- 
hood, it can only be by a Divine vivification of 
his nature, operated without his privity or con- 
cert, while he is asleep, as the scriptures ex- 
press it. " By the deep sleep " which fell upon 
Adam, and in which God took one of his ribs 
and built it into a woman, is signified, says 
Swedenborg, " that state into which man is let 
so that he may appear to possess selfhood : which 
state is likened to sleep, because whilst in it he 
knows no other than that he lives, thinks, speaks, 
and acts of himself." 1 

" It is believed," he says elsewhere, " by al- 
most every one that a man thinks and wills 
from himself, and thence speaks and acts from 
himself. How indeed can any one believe oth- 
erwise, unless he be enlightened, when the ap- 
pearance of his doing these things is so strong 
that it noway differs from the reality, when yet 
that reality is impossible ? — In this sense, the 
sense in which selfhood is commonly understood 

l Arc. Cel., 147. 



4.68 Man by Creation perfectly 

(as manifesting an inherent faculty of willing 
and thinking), no man has any selfhood." 1 

" Man's selfhood is indeed a mere dead noth- 
ing, although to him it seems a something; in 
fact seems everything. Whatever lives in man 
derives from the Lord, and if this were abstract- 
ed, he would drop dead as a stone ; for man is 
only an organ receptive of life. Real selfhood 
belongs to the Lord alone ; and from this is viv- 
ified the selfhood of man." 2 

" That man's selfhood is in itself dead, or 
that no one has any life of himself, is shown 
so clearly in the world of spirits, that evil spir- 
its who love nothing but self, and obstinately 
insist that they live of themselves, are convinced 
of the contrary by sensible experience, and 
forced to confess it. It has been specially per- 
mitted me now for several years to become ac- 
quainted with the human selfhood, and it has 
been granted me to perceive clearly that of my- 
self I could think nothing, but that every idea 
of thought entered by influx, and lastly how 
and whence this influx entered. He therefore 
who supposes that he lives of himself cherishes 
a mistaken judgment, and in consequence ap- 
propriates to himself evil and falsity, which he 
would never do if his belief were formed ac- 
cording to the real truth of the case." 3 " When 
such people are asked what it is to have no self- 
originating principle of action, they reply that it 
is the same thing as not existing." 4 

1 Divine Providence, 308, 309. 3 Ibid., 150. 

2 Arc. Cel., 149. 4 Ibid., 206. 






Imbecile in Himself. 469 

" That a man lives from the Lord alone, is 
evident from this, that there is one sole essence, 
one sole substance, and one sole form, from 
which are all the essences substances and forms 
that are created. This same truth is confirmed 
by living perception among the angels, especially 
the superior angels. These are to all appearance 
as if they lived from themselves ; yea, more so 
than the inferior angels : which results from the 
fact that in proportion as any one is inwardly 
conjoined with the Lord, he seems to himself 
more distinctly his own, though reflectively it 
is more clear to him that he is the Lord's." 1 

" Man's feeling that he is his own life and his 
thinking so, are from fallacy, or because the 
principal is only perceived in the instrument as 
one with it." 2 

Thus, according to Swedenborg, man and an- 
gel are permitted to feel that their life is their own, 
their selfhood or freedom absolute, because other- 
wise they would have no basis of spiritual con- 
junction with God ; for clearly God cannot be 
conjoined with anything out of His own image 
and likeness. By this permission they are enabled 
consciously to reciprocate the Divine love, and 
so become immortal. But the feeling is in itself 
deceptive and requires the regulation of the re- 
flective understanding. For our freedom or self- 
hood is really not absolute, but rigidly condi- 
tional. Swedenborg shows us to be so closely 
associated with spiritual societies as to our affec- 
tion and thought, that if we were forcibly sep- 

1 Divine Providence, 158. 2 Divine Love and Wisdom, 4. 



47° Neither Man, Angel, nor Devil 

arated from them, we should fall down dead : 
" our life," as he says, " remaining only in that 
inmost form by which we are humanly avouched 
and rendered immortal." 1 "Neither angel nor 
devil has any power in himself. If he had the 
least, heaven would fall to pieces, hell become a 
chaos, and Nature perish." 2 " Nothing whatever 
acts from itself, but from something still prior; 
thus nothing at all acts but by communication 
from a First which does act of itself and which 
is God. There is thus but one sole Life, and this 
incapable of being created, though it is eminently 
capable of communicating itself to forms organi- 
cally apposite to its reception. All the objects 
in the created universe, even to the most minute 
of all objects, are such receptive forms. Many 
believe that the soul is itself a spark of life ; 
thus that man since he lives from his soul, lives 
from his own life, or of himself and not by an 
influx of life from God. From such a belief 
proceed innumerable and abhorrent fallacies ; as, 
for example, that God in creation transfers and 
transcribes himself into men, and hence that 
every man is a sort of deity that lives of him- 
self," &c. &c. 3 

If these things be true, and that they are so 
seems obvious to common sense, it becomes per- 
fectly clear that however necessary a part our 
freedom or selfhood plays in reference to our 



1 Athanasian Creed, 58. See 2 Ath. Creed, 34. 

also The Divine Love and Wis- 3 Intercourse of Soul and 

dom, 114, 115, 116, and indeed Body, II. See Appendix, Note 

passim. I. 



has the least Power in Himself. 471 

immortal spiritual conjunction with God, it is 
after all wholly subsidiary to that end; is in fact 
altogether involved in it, and by no means 
evolved from it. That is to say, history (which 
is the sphere of our free activity) is not an event 
supervening upon our creation, and introducing 
new and unexpected complications between 
creature and creator. By no means. It is on 
the contrary in its utmost scope and breadth, a 
pure incident of our creation, being nothing 
more nor less in fact than the gradual and sure 
working out of that great spiritual truth to our 
actual consciousness : so developing us to the 
measure of the creative perfection, and filling us 
with His beatitude. It is sheer atheism to con- 
ceive otherwise; to conceive of any real inde- 
pendence of the creature with regard to the 
creator, as at all possible. What sort of a cre- 
ator could he be said to be, whose creature had 
power to renounce the being it owed exclusively 
to him ? What sort of creative excellence 
would he exhibit, whose hold upon his creature 
was contingent upon the creature's pleasure : 
whose sole capacity to bless his creature could 
be permanently compromised and even alto- 
gether frustrated by the latter's indisposition to 
be blessed % No doubt it is impossible to give 
immortal life to a stone, a cabbage, or a skunk, 
because these are servile forms of existence : no 
doubt, in other words, that certain conditions of 
freedom or selfhood in the creature, are requisite 
to base this gift on the part of the creator. But 
how exquisitely puerile it is to conceive that what 



472 Man's Freedom utterly servile 

is the mere indispensable condition of an event, 
should have power to adjourn the event ! How 
grossly contradictory to represent the exact 
method of a certain achievement — the method 
of its execution — as at the same time the 
method of its defeat ! 

It cannot be denied of course that human 
freedom, human selfhood, is a very absolute and 
unyielding quantity in incompetent hands ; but 
not in those of God almighty. Pius Ninth, 
whom the progress of events and his own strict- 
ly logical obduracy have reduced to the dimen- 
sions of a mere scold, has no power to placate 
it in the interest of established religion. And 
the sombre sanguinary mime, who has been 
Providentially allowed to vault for a day upon 
the throne of France — as if to disabuse men of 
any illusions they might have indulged in regard 
to some possible compromise between Truth and 
Falsity : between unlimited Freedom on the one 
hand and arbitrary Authority on the other : by 
showing them how much more truculent and 
unveracious, how much more disastrous to the 
peace of the world and offensive to its decencies, 
a brand-new self-constituted despotism is sure to 
be, than any even of the oldest and most disso- 
lute church-anointed ones — is equally unskilled 
to cajole it in the interest of political quackery. 
But God almighty is quite a different personage 
and power from any of these. He harmlessly 
wields and directs the very lightning by which 
they are now mocked, now scathed and con- 
sumed. Man's amplest selfhood or freedom is 



to the Divine Councils. 473 

His unlimited handmaid, born of the most vi- 
tal needs of His infinite Love ; and it can no 
more fail to image His great perfection, than 
the obedient marble can fail to reflect the genius 
of Phidias. 

In fact Nature is infinitely more pliant to the 
Divine will — infinitely more sensitive to the 
Divine manipulation — than marble can ever 
possibly be to the hand of the sculptor. For 
the relation between God and Nature in our 
spiritual creation, is a strictly conjugal one, im- 
plying not the enforced but the spontaneous 
subjection of the wife to the husband. The 
relation of the sculptor to his marble, or of the 
artist universally to his material is rather that of 
a lover to his mistress, in which the subjection 
of the latter to the former is still wilful and ca- 
pricious. The perfect marriage fusion which 
exists between infinite and finite, between God 
and Nature, with respect to our regeneration, 
insures us a living maternity as well as pater- 
nity, and hence makes us forms of life naturally 
no less than spiritually. No such relation as 
this exists between the sculptor and his marble. 
The statue is a wholly artificial form, begotten 
without Nature's concert or even consent, being 
forcibly imposed upon her substance. We on 
the other hand are never artificial save when the 
exigencies of priest and king — the needs of a 
corrupt Church and a decaying State — warp us 
from our natural integrity. There is thus no 
community or identity between the statue and 
any of Nature's forms. Nature ignores and 



474 Marble is not more pliant 

abhors every form which is outwardly impressed 
upon her, or whose development is due to Force. 
She produces only forms of life or consciousness, 
whose development is from within outwards. 
The marble is spiritually uncreated by the sculp- 
tor ; that is to say, is wholly unpervaded or un- 
vivified by his distinctive genius; and he conse- 
quently is obliged to subjugate it forcibly or 
from without to his will : the offspring of his 
operation being of course destitute of conscious- 
ness, because destitute of living maternity. But 
nature is all Divinely instinct and pregnant with 
her offspring before they are born, undergoing 
any amount of sympathetic suffering indeed 
while the period of gestation endures ; so that 
we are full of self-consciousness by natural right 
even, or right of the mother, and feel ourselves 
identical with all her force. And what is more 
the Divine artist in shaping our subsequent spir- 
itual extrication, never overrides nor outrages in 
the slightest degree this natural consciousness on 
our part, but on the contrary becomes able to 
woo it and win it over to his superior friendship 
and fellowship, only by disowning every method 
but that of the most tender and assiduous con- 
ciliation. 

Unquestionably there is this obvious and enor- 
mous difference between the statue, regarded as 
the product of man's compulsory power over 
Nature, and man himself, regarded as the prod- 
uct of God's spiritual presence within Nature. 
Nobody can be more willing and indeed alert 
than I am to establish this difference in all its 



to the Hand of the Sculptor. 47 J 

legitimate extent. But great as the difference 
manifestly is, it sinks into absolute nothing as 
arguing in us any independence towards God 
which the statue does not equally claim with 
respect to the sculptor. In fact I maintain that 
human life is not only just as pliant to the Di- 
vine hand as clay is pliant to the hands of the 
potter, and just as incapable of resisting His 
will, but in the long run is infinitely more 
so. 

For this life of Nature, which to all appear- 
ance is so absolutely her own, is in truth God's 
life in her. It is her own life only provisionally, 
that is, so long as she subserves God's ulterior 
formative or redemptive purposes in Man. God 
creates Nature only that He may form Man. 
He alone gives us natural substance or identity, 
and spiritual form or individuality; but He gives 
us the former only in the strictest subserviency 
to the latter; and consequently hides Himself 
with exquisite carefulness from natural sight. 
Because if He should allow us a sensible per- 
ception however dim that we were not ourselves 
absolutely, or by nature alone and irrespectively 
of Him : any more than the statue is itself abso- 
lutely, or by virtue of its material exclusively, 
and independently of the artist: our self-con- 
sciousness would be fundamentally vitiated, and 
we should remain no whit less lifeless than the 
statue itself. He takes exquisite care therefore 
to guard us against this fatality. He gives us 
life or selfhood in an inward concealed way 
altogether, that is, by spiritually vivifying Na- 



476 Our native Wickedness negatively 

ture, or transfiguring it into History; so that 
our consciousness in becoming subject to the 
limitations of space and the relations of time, 
stamps us to our own experience as inevitably 
finite and relative existences, and hence forever 
discriminates us from Him. Thus as I said 
God creates or gives being to Nature, but only 
that He may thereby make, or spiritually form, 
us. For we seeing nothing and suspecting 
nothing of the latent Divine presence in nature, 
suppose her maternity to be final or absolute, 
and hence unhesitatingly appropriate the life 
with which she is aglow to ourselves, to the 
extent of becoming spiritually bound up and 
identified with all its issues. 

Now as this life is in itself really Divine, that 
is to say, infinite as having no relation to space, 
and absolute as having no relation to time, we, 
in thus appropriating it as we do without the 
least misgiving to our most undivine — i. e. 
finite and relative — selves, of necessity break it 
up, belittle, and degrade it to the minutest dimen- 
sions of egotism and lust. This necessity will 
at once become intelligible to the reader, if he 
imagine the sculptor as primarily creating — 
i. e. animating by his own genius — the clay 
out of which the statue is subsequently to be 
shaped. It is obvious that the statue in that 
case would be no longer lifeless but living, 
being animated or invested with personality on 
the mother's side as well as the father's. If the 
sculptor himself inwardly quickened or gave 
spiritual substance to the marble, as God quick- 



attests the Divinity of our Origin. 477 

ens or gives spiritual substance to Nature, the 
marble like Nature would instinctively yearn to 
his desire, would spontaneously bring forth what-, 
soever he exacted of it ; and the offspring conse- 
quently would palpitate with all the mother's 
life. Like ourselves indeed it would be alive 
or conscious only on the maternal side : for 
however traditionally instructed it might be- 
come in the faith of an invisible spiritual pater- 
nity, operative within the bowels of its material 
substance, this would long remain, like our tradi- 
tional faith in God's creative presence in nature, 
a mere doctrinal and not an experimental con- 
viction, while the statue would infallibly incline 
just as we do to accept its own actual conscious- 
ness as the measure of the truth, or infer that 
what it organically grasped of existence was in 
fact the all of life. Thus its spiritual immatu- 
rity or lack of living sympathy with its paternal 
progenitor — its historic inexperience and igno- 
rance of everything beyond the seeming and 
palpable — would leave it without any true 
standard of judgment: would render it in its 
own private estimation a very perfect creation 
already, and array it in every presumptuous, 
arrogant, and if need be, overbearing and hos- 
tile attitude towards its fellows. 

This is our own moral history in a similitude. 
The sole philosophic explanation of our univer- 
sal natural pride truculence and turbulence is, 
that we take our natural consciousness for grant- 
ed, regard it as absolute, suppose ourselves to be 
spiritually or individually vitalized as we issue 



47 8 O ur Experience of Evil striftly 

from Nature's womb, whereas we are then living 
a wholly supposititious life, a life upon which we 
have not the slightest conceivable claim, except 
in virtue of its prospective spiritual advantage 
to us. Accordingly whenever our consciousness 
reports us in any degree superior to the persons 
about us, there is no end of our spiritual cackling 
or inward self-complacency over the discovery ; 
or in any degree inferior, there is no end of our 
inward chagrin and despondency. In short we 
each of us instinctively appropriate this great 
and infinite life of God in Nature to ourselves, to 
our own puny finite selves : but inasmuch as we 
are yet historically unreconciled to each other: 
inasmuch as these finite selves of ours have not 
as yet been infinited — i. e. harmonized one with 
another — by the advent of a true society, fel- 
lowship, or equality among men, and are conse- 
quently without that field of spontaneous action 
which only such a society guarantees : so the 
Divine life thus instinctively appropriated by us, 
finds no adequate and orderly ultimation in our 
outward life and action, and hence is constrained 
to come forth in every perverse infernal form of 
self-seeking, lust, and murder. 

But what of all this a thousand times over? 
It is a strict constitutional or subjective experi- 
ence, and has no more logical relevancy to our 
perfected individuality, to our objective spiritual 
creation, than the rude unseemly heaps of bricks 
and mortar, which bestrew the site of a palace, 
have to the future accomplished edifice. Evil 
belongs to our purely natural or embryonic con- 



Constitutional or Subjective. ^r/g 

sciousness, bearing precisely the same relation 
to the spiritual perfectness we acquire in the 
Lord, that the uncouth unhandsome lineaments 
of the foetus bear to the full-grown man. For 
as we saw just now, although the statue being 
animated to its own consciousness only by its 
visible mother, and incapable as yet of spirit- 
ually reflecting or reproducing the genius of its 
father, might be a very conceited and foolish 
statue, a very imperfect and contemptible one as 
primarily begotten and born, it would yet be a 
conscious one, instinct with a life or personality 
of its own, and capable therefore of being 
moulded by the paternal spirit, which all the 
while vivifies its maternal substance, into any 
grace of form and demeanor which that spirit 
itself originally is. Of course the sculptor — • 
had he really this power previously to impreg- 
nate the marble by his genius — would be bound 
to acquiesce in its essential characteristics as 
marble, and demand an offspring only so far ap- 
proximate to himself originally, as those respect- 
able characteristics permitted. Nothing could 
be more puerile on his part than to blame the 
statue for any possible imperfection or limitation 
attaching to it on its merely constitutional side. 
For the very task of his genius is so to vivify 
the obedient marble with ideal grace, as that the 
statue may finally get complete extrication, or 
imperfect substance become taken up and glori- 
fied into perfect form. 

The child however offers us a better, because 
ready-made, illustration of the point in hand. 



480 Evil means the Domination of 

The child derives body from the mother exclu- 
sively, and quickening soul from the father. Yet 
no father is silly enough to be angry that his 
child is born spiritually feeble, individually in- 
firm, insufficient to himself indeed beyond all 
other natural forms. Why ? Because he sees 
in the child's constitutional feebleness but an 
image or emblem of the spiritual destitution 
which the universal mind of man is under tow- 
ards God by nature, or before culture has set 
in ; the visible mother in any case being but the 
mute unconscious symbol of a far grander invisi- 
ble maternity : being but a special handmaid or 
deputy whom great Nature honors for the nonce 
with her own indefeasible function and attri- 
butes. As the universal mother herself at first 
brings forth fruit to God, spiritual fruit, not 
spontaneously but by Divine constraint, the con- 
straint of priest and king, so necessarily the spe- 
cific or representative mother being under law to 
her husband and subject to his will, brings forth 
natural fruit with infinite labor and sorrow. She 
is as passive to her own inherited limitations — 
as passive to the capacity of the common mother 
— as her child is passive to her. 1 

To the reader who duly weighs the foregoing 
considerations, nothing will seem more fallacious 
than the tendency of religion, on the one hand, 
to exalt our natural identity to practical infini- 
tude, by making us spiritually chargeable before 
God with all the good and evil which inhere in 
our physical temperament ; and of science, on the 

1 See Appendix, note J. 



the Individual by the Common Life. 481 

other, to give absoluteness to our natural indi- 
viduality, in making us morally chargeable be- 
fore society with all the good and evil which flow 
from our action. They might with equal pro- 
priety defame the statue itself for the imperfec- 
tions inherent in its material ; or place a laurel 
crown upon its head for the skill which the 
sculptor has exhibited in putting those imper- 
fections out of sight. Of course the statue is 
ideally perfect — i. e. perfect as a work of Art 
— only in so far as it marries opus et materies, 
form and substance, sculptor and marble, in its 
own indistinguishable unity ; just as we are spir- 
itually perfect — i. e. perfect as a Divine crea- 
tion — and attain to the stature of finished man- 
hood, only in so far as we reconcile father and 
mother, God and Nature, spirit and flesh, infi- 
nite and finite in the bosom of our sesthetic 
individuality, of our spontaneous life and action. 
But this is a very different thing from saying 
that we are literally full of personal merit and 
personal demerit towards our respective sources. 
It is one thing, and a perfectly righteous thing, 
to say that the statue is individually perfect or 
imperfect as measured by its own ideal, and 
that we are individually perfect or imperfect as 
measured against our Divine destiny. But it 
is quite another, and a perfectly unrighteous, 
thing, to say that either of us has the slight- 
est possible relation, either of individual merit 
or of individual demerit, with respect either 
to the formative substance out of which, or 
31 



482 Good means the Social Subjeffion 

the creative power by which, we are severally 
begotten and brought forth. 

We are in no danger of ever enacting this 
judgment with regard to the statue. Why *? 
For the obvious reason that the statue is a 
strictly formal and in no wise substantial effigy 
of its maker's genius. It is a purely ideal or 
imaginative and therefore lifeless form. It lacks 
natural or constitutional identity with other ex- 
istence, and hence is destitute alike of subjec- 
tive consciousness and objective reality. But 
we habitually enact the judgment with respect 
to ourselves. Why ? Simply because we have 
precisely what the statue lacks, natural selfhood 
or identity, and are therefore capable of appro- 
priating to ourselves a good and a truth which 
are really Divine, but which we could never 
dream of ascribing to the statue. Thus the 
difference between tfs is not in any conceivable 
inequality of dependence we are severally under 
to the powers which create us — for no such 
inequality exists — but solely in the hopeless 
inequality of those creative powers themselves. 
The love which is operative in our creation is 
infinite : that is to say, it is so unhindered by 
any regard to self, as to make itself unstintedly 
over to us, and hence leave us no rest until we 
have become both collectively and individually 
endued with all its perfection ; or until we have 
become in-finited in our turn, by becoming con- 
sciously one each with all and all with each. The 
love which fashions the statue on the other hand 
is a finite love, the love of realizing and enjoying 



of the Common to the Individual Life, 483 

its own existence and potency, and is so little 
creative therefore or capable of communicating 
even its own meagre inspiration to the work of 
its hands, as to leave it relatively dead. In short 
we by virtue of the greatness of our creative 
source possess natural selfhood or freedom, 
which is a consciousness of life in ourselves, 
and hence by instinctively appropriating a good 
which is infinite, and a truth which is absolute, 
we become at last Divinely empowered to re- 
produce them, and make them legitimately our 
own, in all the breadth of our associated life, 
and all the fruits of our spontaneous action. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

I have now finished — most imperfectly I ad- 
mit — the task I set myself, which was to illus- 
trate the Physics of Creation, by showing how 
practically paramount in the Divine regard the 
interests of our natural identity or community 
must always be, to those of our spiritual indi- 
viduality and difference. I have shown that if 
the creator have power, first of all, to give us 
such valid projection from Himself as is equiva- 
lent to our experience of a perfectly veracious 
consciousness or selfhood — which he does by 
suffering us to know and appropriate all the 
good and evil wrapped up in our finite nature 
— He can have no difficulty in subsequently 
moulding that consciousness to whatsoever spir- 
itual issues He will. If we feel ourselves so 
identified with our natural constitution, with our 
natural organization of sensibility and intelli- 
gence, as freely to assume all the good and evil 
which inhere in its exercise, then the Divine 
Providence will obviously enjoy, so far as our 
consciousness is concerned, a clear field of ad- 
ministration toward us, and may discipline us 
to what heights of rational and spiritual cul- 
ture He sees good. But manifestly without 
this natural basis He can achieve no manner of 



Spiritual Import of the Gospel. 485 

rational nearness to us ; will be incapable of any 
sort of intercourse with us ; since we should in 
that case remain not only under that hopeless 
destitution of real or objective being to which 
our very nature condemns us, but void also of 
the phenomenal or subjective existence to which 
He, in the infinitude of His power, makes even 
this natural destitution ministerial. I have am- 
ply shown in short that the natural existence of 
the creature is rigidly indispensable to base his 
spiritual evolution : to confer upon him that 
preliminary basis of identity or fixity, without 
which his private individuality — his spiritual 
being or character — would be wholly impossi- 
ble and even inconceivable : so that God's cre- 
ative presence and formative or redemptive oper- 
ation in human nature itself — and not as we 
have foolishly supposed in the isolated individ- 
ual bosom alone — avouch themselves the inex- 
orably fundamental postulate henceforth of a 
true Philosophy. 

I might indeed stop short here, because I have 
already answered as I went along, either directly 
or by implication, every question my reader will 
probably feel prompted to put to me. But I 
wish to add a word more by way of summing 

The spiritual import of the gospel is that God 
creates us every moment naturally no less than 
spiritually; that He gives us spiritual form in- 
deed only by giving us natural substance. This 
as we have seen is precisely what is meant by 
creation, philosophically defined, namely the giv- 



486 Creation means the giving 

ing natural substance (identity) to spiritual form 
("individuality). Of course the creator is not 
supposed to create Himself in any case, but 
another than Himself. And no possible basis 
of identity can exist for this other — no con- 
ceivable ground of consciousness separating him 
from his creator, can be argued for him — unless 
it be supplied by this very destitution of being 
which is intrinsic, or as we say, natural to him. 
The fact of his creation implies that he be in 
himself or naturally the exact opposite of what 
he is in God or by creation, namely : full of 
destitution : so that unless God's spiritual crea- 
tion be organized to the creature's experience on 
this preliminary basis of natural destitution, he 
will never know anything about it, will never 
come to spiritual consciousness, but must remain 
forever inanimate, non-existent, dead. Hence I 
say that creation means the giving natural sub- 
stance to spiritual form : since the nature of the 
creature, which alone identifies him or affords 
him conscious subjectivity, is the only thing 
which spiritually disjoins him with God. 

In order to leave no obscurity upon my mean- 
ing, let me here say what I mean by the nature 
of the creature ; for clearly God can have no 
contact with human nature outside of the hu- 
man consciousness. By the created nature, then, 
I mean whatsoever all creatures possess in com- 
mon : thus whatsoever distinguishes them from 
their creator. Nature is thus a purely spiritual 
quantity, expressive of a certain community 
which to our perception characterizes all exist- 



Natural Substance to Spiritual Form. 487 

ence, or gives it identity in spite of its individ- 
ual diversities. It signifies no visible tangible 
conceivable thing, but only a certain spiritual 
bond, a certain rational order, which I perceive 
investing all visible tangible things equally or 
in common. We never see Nature, nor smell 
it, nor taste it, nor touch it, nor hear it. We 
see and hear and smell and taste and touch the 
specific things of nature ; that is, the various 
individual forms which this common bond con- 
founds or identifies. We see the tree or the 
horse, we breathe the air, we smell the rose, we 
handle the rock, we drink the water, which are 
all specific natural forms : but the great spiritual 
personality of Nature herself we recognize only 
in thought. In short our conception of nature 
in se or as a personality and apart from her 
specific forms, is a purely intellectual concep- 
tion. 

Accordingly when I say that God vivifies the 
nature of His creature, in order to give the 
creature that sufficing identity which may serve 
to base his subsequent unlimited spiritual ex- 
pansion, I do not of course picture nature to 
my imagination as an actual entity existing 
somewhere in itself and apart from the experi- 
ence of its subjects, which God visits and ma- 
nipulates. No such thing. I merely mean to 
say that He quickens the common mind of the 
race, or invests it with His own perfection, in 
such a manner as to overcome all its inherent 
weaknesses, and render it an indestructible foun- 
dation for any measure of spiritual expansion 



488 Nature means the "Principle 

on the part of its individual subjects. In other 
words I mean that He runs our natural com- 
munity or identity up from its broadest and 
most diffuse beginnings, into the acutest and 
most exquisite conceivable individual form : so 
that we shall eventually see this brute and abject 
Nature transparent with human substance, glori- 
fied into the unity of a living Man. 

The reader now sees plainly enough that when 
I speak of the nature of the creature, I have no 
idea of nature as a material quantity realizable 
under the conditions of time and space, but ex- 
clusively as a spiritual quantity realizable only 
under the conditions of consciousness. And 
consequently he will not suppose me referring 

— when I speak of God's vivifying our nature 

— to any imaginary outside or physical opera- 
tion of God on us, but exclusively to His spir- 
itual operation within the limits of our own 
phenomenal consciousness. He is of a love so 
infinite, i. e. so void of self-love, that even in 
bestowing His own eternal blessedness upon the 
creature, He does so in no arbitrary overpower- 
ing way, but in a way of the tenderest and most 
exquisite conciliation to the creature's own gross- 
est necessities, to his own most abject limitations. 
He does not forcibly drag the reluctant and 
struggling creature by the hair of his head up to 
His own impracticable altitudes, as almost any 
of our astonishing doctors of divinity would be 
sure to do ; but on the contrary immerses Him- 
self unshrinkingly in the creature's own atmos- 
phere ; diminishes Himself with unfaltering 



of Community in all Existence. 489 

constancy to the creature's own level; conde- 
scends with loving and patient perseverance to 
every most ungodly trait, to every most infirm 
tendency, of the creature's own consciousness, 
in order there to construct Himself an anchor- 
age in the creature's regard which no winds will 
ever jeopardize, which no floods will ever efface. 
In short His love is so unlike ours, as to let 
whatsoever is intrinsically most opposite and 
repugnant to its own quality, come to the sur- 
face, come to the amplest self-consciousness, only 
that that familiar consciousness may itself finally 
turn out the all-sufficient witness of the creative 
mercy, and the all-sufficient pledge of the crea- 
ture's invincible fidelity. 

This is that great creative operation spiritually 
wrought by God in our nature, which Chris- 
tianity reveals, and which all subsequent history 
has been forcing upon our comprehension : con- 
sisting first, in His permitting us, as a community 
acknowledging His name, to feel and exhibit 
all that common want or destitution which be- 
longs to us as natural subjects, and which is 
merely organized in our appetites and passions, 
and bring forth whatever overpowering cupidity 
and ferocity of manners are bred of such want : 
and then secondly in His making us to see so 
keenly all the horror and hideousness of this 
state of things, as of ourselves or spiritually to 
avert ourselves from it, and eventually disown 
and disuse every method and institution of our 
associated life which nourish and perpetuate it. 
The love which vivifies our common nature, or 



49° Philosophic Significance 

gives us being, is really infinite : and as we each 
of us with every breath we draw appropriate 
this infinitude to ourselves, feeling it to be very 
bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, we 
necessarily put on for a time the lineaments of 
the devil, and expand to all the dimensions of 
conceit, tyranny, and lust. By my very nature 
as a derivative being- — as having really no life 
in myself, while yet I feel myself full of life — 
I am irresistibly prone to all manner of self- 
illusion; instinctively exalting myself out of all 
rational measure, and claiming a dominion wholly 
disproportionate to my force. Now the Divine 
Love permits, as Revelation teaches us, all this 
natural arrogance obduracy and imbecility on 
our part, in the interest exclusively of our im- 
mortal spiritual advantage. According to Rev- 
elation, which affirms Christ's glorification down 
to his flesh and bones (/. e. the consummate mar- 
riage of the Divine and human natures) the Di- 
vine Love is so literally infinite in its resources, 
as to make no account of our latent and uncon- 
scious selfishness, but on the contrarv allows it 
every conceivable latitude and longitude of man- 
ifestation, in order that His own true power in en- 
dowing us with spiritual manhood may thus pro- 
cure itself free play. In a word the Divine Love 
is of that essentially formative or redemptive 
quality, that it permits its creature to effloresce 
to the fullest possibilities of his natural finiteness 
and corruption, in order that the interests of his 
conscious identity being thus put upon an inde- 
structible basis, he may at last become endowed 






of the Christian Truth. 491 

by his maker with a spiritual individuality worthy 
of Him whose glory it is eternally to subjugate 
evil to good, dark to light, death to life. 

I do not hesitate to say that it is this, and this 
alone, which makes the gospel of the Lord Je- 
sus Christ worthy of its name, namely : that it 
shows the total mystery of creation to lie in a 
formative or redemptive work Divinely wrought 
within the very nature of the creature. It makes 
all God's creative ability to turn upon His un- 
stintedly glorifying the literal flesh and bones of 
His creature; or, what is the same thing, ani- 
mating our lowest propensities with His own spir- 
itual substance. Nothing short of this appeases 
the mighty hunger of the heart towards God. It 
is much no doubt when one is prone to evil, to 
be forcibly withheld from it, as Swedenborg al- 
leges the angels are, by an incessant exertion 
of Divine power. But how tedious it would 
be to believe that the Divine power was always 
to be thus tasked in behalf of such reptiles as 
we are ! How gladly would one forego one's 
inmost scoundrelism, to release the Divine love 
from any further strain and tension in his behalf! 
How irresistible in other words is the aspiration 
of the soul, when once it has caught the flavor of 
the Divine name, to become like Him, to be- 
come self-prompted, self-sustained, and self-guar- 
anteed, in all goodness and truth ! Now the 
gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is the fullest 
Divine justification, the frankest Divine authen- 
tication, of this aspiration on our part, inasmuch 
as it shows all God's love and wisdom and power 



49 2 Philosophic Significance 

engaged in gratifying it. It proves the Divine 
infinitude to be so real a quantity, the Divine 
love to be so absolute an energy, as to glorify 
the very nature of the creature, by converting 
its intrinsic evil into otherwise unimaginable 
good, its abounding death into otherwise incon- 
ceivable life : so vacating or superseding that 
inveterate oppugnancy to itself which inheres 
in the finite constitution, and turning it into the 
eternal argument and illustration of its own 
matchless truth. Creation would indeed be 
wholly inadmissible to a philosophic regard, on 
any lower terms than those prescribed by the 
gospel. For the very nature of the creature, as 
a finite or dependent being, must eternally dis- 
qualify him for the Divine fellowship, unless 
God's own resources enable Him spiritually to 
overcome the disqualification. Hence the enor- 
mous aid Revelation brings to Philosophy, in 
that it places the entire stress of the creative 
operation in overcoming a certain obstacle 
which the finite nature itself offers to the Di- 
vine inhabitation ; an obstacle so genuine and 
inveterate as to succumb to nothing short of the 
actual Divine vivification of the nature, and its 
consequent unimpeded elevation to the utmost 
heights of spiritual form and order. 

Such is the profound philosophic truth which 
underlies the Christian doctrine of the Atonement, 
or reconciliation of the Divine and human natures 
in the Christ. The infinite God himself is hence- 
forth the open secret of our conscious existence as 
well as of our unconscious being. The dogma of 



of the Christian Truth. 493 

Christ's divinity, of his glorification down to his 
literal flesh and bones, implies, when interiorly 
viewed, that infinite Love and Wisdom create 
us every moment physically as well as psychi- 
cally ; afford us every moment natural or con- 
scious identity, as well as spiritual or unconscious 
individuality : so that our very bodies, being 
instinct with the same Life which quickens our 
souls, should challenge an equal sanctity with 
them. 1 "Creation," says Swedenborg, "signifies 
what is Divine from inmosts to outmosts, or from 
primaries to ultimates. For whatsoever derives 
from God, begins from Himself and proceeds ac- 
cording to order to its last form, thus through the 
heavens into the world, and there rests as in its 
own end, for the ultimate term of Divine order 
is in mundane nature. Such is the meaning of 
creation." 2 We to be sure have not the faintest 
suspicion of God's intimate presence and opera- 
tion in our consciousness, because we have no 
recognition of His creative activity in Nature ; 
but on the contrary habitually hold nature to be 
so indisputably absolute, as to conceive a just 
doubt sometimes whether God so much as cre- 
ated it "once on a time." In very juvenile states 
of mind indeed we often argue ingeniously even 
against the Divine existence, ferity thou art a 
God that hide st thyself God of Israel, the Saviour! 

1 A superior sanctity even, if is perfect, is holy above interior 

need be. For, as Swedenborg things, because the holiness of 

remarks, when commenting upon interior things is there com- 

the ephod or outer garment of plete." See Arc. Cel., 9824. 
the Jewish high priest, " the 2 Arc. Cel., 10634. 
outmost or ultimate, when order 



494 Consciousness always identifies 

Of course the reason why creation always 
eludes a scientific induction is, that it is prima- 
rily a process of matriculation, and the mother 
is naturally nearer and dearer to the child's heart 
than the father. Everything which exists or is 
formed presupposes both a visible material sub- 
stance out of which — and an invisible spiritual 
force by which — it exists or is formed, and of 
which it is the unity. The former element in- 
corporates it, gives it body, so identifying it with 
all other things; the latter animates it, gives it 
soul, so individualizing it from all other things. 
In other words the making of things, the giving 
them conscious life or form, involves of neces- 
sity a double movement : one dynamical, active, 
and paternal, which fecundates the thing, gives 
it spiritual being or soul ; the other statical, pas- 
sive, and maternal, which fixes the thing, gives 
it material existence or body, and so promotes or 
serves the higher spiritual process. 

Now what I say is that consciousness always 
identifies its subject with the mother-element in 
this transaction, and separates him from the 
father. I have not the slightest consciousness 
of myself save upon my natural side, so that 
unless the relation between God and Nature 
which issues in my creation, turn out a strictly 
conjugal one, in which the wife becomes en- 
dowed with all the wealth of the husband, or 
incorporate with His substance, I shall remain 
forever ignorant, except from hearsay possibly, 
of my paternal source. I know myself, or am 
conscious, only as a natural subject. I may have 



us with maternal Nature. 495 

heard very much about the Divine existence apart 
from Nature, and been taught to infer that I 
shall sooner or later come into direct relation with 
such existence. But the information is supersti- 
tious, and the expectation idle. I shall never 
really know God, save in so far as He is inter- 
preted in my proper self-knowledge ; save in so 
far as He is revealed in the familiar lineaments 
of my own nature ; save in so far as He is repro- 
duced in every feature of my own subjectivity. 
The child knows his mother without anybody's 
help, or instinctively ; since the incessant contact 
he has with her leaves no obscurity upon that 
point. But he knows his father only upon his 
mother's testimony. He refuses to acknowl- 
edge any one as lawful father, whom she does 
not first acknowledge as sole husband. This 
complete dependence of the father upon the 
mother in prolification, is what gives marriage 
its legal sanctity, and makes conjugal infidelity 
so much greater a reproach to the woman than 
the man. People often complain of the legal 
subordination of the wife to the husband in mar- 
riage; and rightfully too. For it has nothing to 
excuse it but the typical virtue of the institution, 
which implies the mystical union of the Divine 
and human natures in all true creation; or im- 
ports that the lower nature becomes so intimately 
and inseparably fused with the higher one, in the 
social regeneration of the race, as that Immanuel 
— God with us — must eventually confess itself 
the sole authentic and living Word of the New 
Dispensation. 



496 Why does the Wife's Personality 

The law of our civic morality which suspends 
the legitimacy of the child upon the father alone, 
thus implying the civic inferiority of the mother, 
seems, like a thousand other things in our tradi- 
tional ethics, a wholly arbitrary arrangement 
For one would naturally say that the visible 
mother afforded a far readier and less dubious 
ground of affiliation for the child than the invis- 
ible father. The custom however is to honor 
the less obvious paternal element, and nothing 
reconciles the mind to it, or redeems it from 
glaring caprice, but the fact that all our historic 
experience of every sort — great as it appears in 
itself — is yet vastly greater and more interest- 
ing in its typical character ; that is to say when 
viewed as representing a profounder and more 
permanent because Divine order of life for man 
upon earth. The honor we traditionally pay to 
paternity over maternity is not an arbitrary thing. 
It grows out of the absolute necessity all human 
legislation has been under to reflect and promote 
the great truth of human destiny, which is the 
Divine Incarnation, or the eventual unimpeded 
manifestation of the infinite Divine perfection 
in all the forms of human nature, especially its 
basest forms. During the infancy of the race as 
of the individual of course, the law of the 
mother prevails over that of the father, so that 
at last the mind would infallibly succumb to this 
strong bias and sink down in abject Naturalism, 
were it not that the Divine Providence so guides 
and overrules human legislation, as gradually to 
mould the very mind itself of the race upon this 



I 



merge in that of the Husband? 497 

great interior truth of its altogether Divine and 
infinite paternity, and its merely finite and com- 
paratively unimportant maternity. This provi- 
dential shaping of the common mind of the race 
shows itself very strikingly in this customary 
rule of affiliation. For while we have individu- 
ally had no conception of the actual truth of the 
case, but on the contrary have supposed our be- 
ing to be wholly natural and finite, the Divine 
Love has been all the while silently defeating the 
fallacy, by fashioning our entire historic con- 
sciousness upon the mould of the opposite ver- 
ity : that is to say, by making the common or 
associate mind reflect the rightful primacy of the 
spiritual or propagative energy in creation, repre- 
sented by the father, over the material and merely 
productive energy, represented by the mother. 

But the law is universal, being avouched as 
much in art as in life. The sculptor forms his 
statue out of the maternal marble, only by endu- 
ing the marble with the form of his own genius, 
investing it with the impress of his own aesthetic 
personality. The marble finites the statue, or 
imprisons it in her own unexplored womb. The 
genius of the sculptor animates the statue, gives 
it soul or ideal form, merely by ^-fining it, so 
to speak, or /^-finiting it from this maternal en- 
velope. The mother finites the child, or wraps 
it away from light and life, from sight and con- 
sciousness in her own unconscious bowels : the 
seed of the father releases the child from this 
imprisonment, by animating it or giving it living 
soul. The truth which the poet sings, the beauty 
32 



498 *£he Reason to be found only 

which the painter reproduces upon the canvas, 
the science which the scholar patiently elaborates, 
lie all hopelessly entombed under any amount 
of actual obscuration and deformity : the pene- 
trating aroma of the student's or artist's genius 
pervades their sepulchre, and awakens the mute 
unconscious inmates to life and form. These 
illustrations, which might be multiplied to any 
extent, make it plain that all existence or form 
both natural and artificial presupposes a most 
unequal or divided parentage ; and then sup- 
poses a union so truly conjugal between these 
discordant parents, as that the maternal element 
becomes taken up and disappears in the paternal 
one ; or what is material substance becomes rav- 
ished — glorified — transfigured into spiritual 
form. 

The fundamental law of all true creation 
or prolification is marriage, and marriage never 
takes place between equals, but on the contrary 
invariably exacts a hierarchical distribution of 
the parties to it, the wife deriving rank from the 
husband. If any one should have a contrary no- 
tion, as that a relation of equality exists between 
the natural and spiritual elements in production, 
let me remind him that the productive process 
is always primarily a process of elimination or 
casting out, and only subsequently one of assimi- 
lation or building up. The desire of the wife is 
to the husband, and he shall rule over her. The 
sculptor calls his statue forth out of the marble 
by a gradual process of elimination or rejection : 
not by cherishing his material, but by skilfully 



the Symbolism of Marriage. 499 

and firmly rejecting it. Nothing can be more 
strikingly disparate and incommensurate in them- 
selves, than a sculptor's genius on the one hand, 
and a brute block of marble on the other. Yet 
the statue, which unites in itself these discordant 
things so perfectly as to obliterate every vestige 
of the original disproportion, could never be able 
to do this, unless one of the elements was essen- 
tially superior, the other inferior; unless one com- 
manded and the other obeyed ; unless one were 
object and the other subject. The resultant form 
in all prolification is high or low, perfect or im- 
perfect, energetic or feeble, just as the mother is 
first the wife; that is to say, just as the maternal 
or productive element merges and disappears 
in its paternal or prolific one : as in the statue, 
for example, the material marble becomes utterly 
wrought and taken up into ideal form. If the 
form imposed by the sculptor completely ravish 
— swallow up — glorify into its own ideal pro- 
portions — the material supplied by the marble, 
so that you can nowhere put your finger and say, 
" Here substance dominates form, or nature rebels 
against art : " the work is perfect and challenges 
immortal approbation. But if the form any- 
where allow the substance to peep out, so that 
you can say, " Here is muscle and there is mar- 
ble : " if in other words the sculptor's genius has 
not been able to compel the marble into ideal 
form so thoroughly, as that you shall never once 
think of it as rebellious but only as completely 
subjugated to his skill : then the work is imper- 
fect, and invites to new enterprise. In looking 



500 Marriage typifies the Union of 

at a perfect work of Art, you never think of di- 
viding your admiration between the artist and 
nature : on the contrary you bestow it all upon 
the artist ; because you know that what he gets 
from nature is never furtherance but always op- 
position ; so that his genius avouches its purity 
in fact in the exact ratio of its invention or 
power to overcome difficulties. Art is the glo- 
rified or resurgent form of man's activity, be- 
cause like all resurrection it implies its subject's 
previous death to a lower form of action : the 
artist being pronounced artist and not simple 
craftsman exclusively by his originality, which 
is his power to unlearn tradition, and undo or 
supersede all that was ever done before him. In 
a perfect work of art accordingly the substance 
is wholly swallowed up of the form : what 
is spiritual in it completely glorifies or transfig- 
ures what is natural and material : so as that out 
of two things so unequal and discordant in se as 
a sculptor's genius and a brute unconscious block 
of marble, a third thing is generated so Divinely 
perfect or at one with itself as to defy analysis, 
and forbid the wit of all mankind to discern 
what or how much belongs to the one parent, 
what or how much to the other. 

Precisely so it is with our perfected conscious- 
ness, with our spontaneous life, with whatsoever 
we do from delight or attraction. Infinite and 
finite are so livingly united, so lovingly wedded 
and bedded within the periphery of our sponta- 
neity, within all the range of our sesthetic life 
and action, that it is sheer nonsense to attempt a 



Infinite and Finite in true Manhood. 501 

logical divorce of them, by saying where one 
begins and the other leaves off. The true son 
of God wears a garment without seam, woven from 
the top throughout, and which cannot therefore be 
rent or divided, one half to God, the other to 
Nature. You might more easily divide heat 
from light in the solar ray, by gazing stupidly at 
the sun. Art announces a marriage so perfect, a 
union so dazzling, between the Divine and the 
human natures, between God's fulness and man's 
want, as utterly to forbid analysis, and put ped- 
antry consequently out of countenance. The 
child of the marriage is so intensely himself or 
individualized — both parents are so exquisitely 
blent and melted in all the length and breadth, 
in all the height and depth of his characteristic 
action — that he is indeed absolutely sure, until 
his spiritual life dawns within him, to lose sight 
of the modest unostentatious principal, and recog- 
nize only the gorgeous overpowering accessory. 
In fact our perfected or associate conscious- 
ness, our aesthetic life and action : that new and 
regenerate nature in us which avouches the Prov- 
idential reconciliation of the twin antagonist ele- 
ments of our consciousness — church and state, 
self and the neighbor, interest and duty — in a 
faultless society or fellowship among men : so 
completely fuses in the bosom of its own unity 
God and Nature, infinite and finite, that it is of 
no practical account to anybody but myself (and 
this only with reference to my immortal possi- 
bilities), which element I emphasize in the trans- 
action; whether the more obvious maternal, or 



502 What has so long blinded us to the 

the less obvious paternal, one ; whether the 
grandly creative element, or the simply consti- 
tutive one. So palpably true is all this, that 
grave apoplectic divines, and light ambitious 
men of science, have only to follow their various 
bent, and warmly espouse either the naturalistic 
or spiritualistic hypothesis, in order to insure 
them an attentive audience and a very consider- 
able repute with their respective factions, as 
champions of distressed Truth : though, sooth 
to say, poor Truth herself, inasmuch as she must 
be wholly unhurt by any man's or any set of 
men's contempt, is never likely to be too much 
flattered by any man's or any set of men's ad- 
hesion. 

Why have we all been so long befogged as 
to these spiritual or philosophic contents of Rev- 
elation ? Why have we been so hopelessly 
blind to its grand humanitary scope and sub- 
stance ? For no other reason than the church's 
superstitious, because exclusive, regard for its 
letter. Our intelligence has become so artificial 
and wooden, so warped from the pure spirit of 
the truth, by the long bondage which the church 
has kept us under to the letter, that I doubt 
not the heathen are capable of a readier insight 
into the proper spirituality of the Divine name, 
than we. Of course we felicitate ourselves over 
the heathen in possessing the letter of Reve- 
lation. But if a man gather a rich harvest of 
nuts only to store them away in his garret, and 
never permit one of them to be cracked, wherein 
is he better off than his neighbor who perchance 



Spiritual Contents of Revelation? 503 

has gathered none ? More than this : if a man 
lay by a store of eggs and never permit them 
to be consumed or hatched, is he not greatly 
worse off than his destitute neighbor, who has 
no such perishable property on hand, to menace 
him with all manner of unsavory consequences, 
the moment he attempts to put it to any reason- 
able human use *? 

The letter of Revelation has doubtless proved 
inestimably advantageous to our civilization; 
but the most orderly citizenship is as remote from 
spontaneous or spiritual manhood, as baked ap- 
ples are from ripe ones. Compared with heathen 
nations we are indeed as baked apples to green ; 
but I do not see that apples plucked green from 
the tree and assiduously cooked, as we have been, 
are near so likely to ripen in the long run, as 
those which are still left hanging upon the boughs, 
exposed to God's unstinted sun and air. We 
manage to maintain our egregious self-compla- 
cency unperturbed by vehemently compassion- 
ating the heathen, and sending out missionaries 
to convert them to our foolish ecclesiastical hab- 
its : precisely as if a baked apple should begrudge 
its fellows their natural ripening, and beg them 
also to come and sputter their indignant life away 
under the burning summer of the oven, under 
the mellowing autumn of the bake-pan. In fact 
the heathen I suspect find it difficult to regard us 
yet even as baked fruit. Our ungenerous over- 
bearing and polluting intercourse with them fits 
them rather to regard us only as very rotten fruit 
Whether baked or rotten, however, we are in 



504 The Church's Superstition. 

either case, so far as our ecclesiastical and polit- 
ical manners are concerned, past the chance of. 
any inward or spiritual ripening. So far as our 
ecclesiastical conscience is concerned especially, 
there doesn't seem one drop of honest native 
unsophisticated juice left in us. If there were, 
could we be so content year in and year out to 
see our clergy, heterodox and orthodox, alter- 
nately cuff and clout God's sacred word — which 
is inwardly all alive and leaping with spiritual 
or universal meaning — as if it were some puny 
brat of man's begetting, some sickly old-wives' 
tale, some vapid and senile tradition, destitute 
even of a fabulous grace and tenderness ? 



And after these things T saw another angel come down from 
heaven, having great power ; and the earth was lightened with his 

s lor y- 

And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the 
great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and 
the hold of every foul spirit, and the cage of every unclean and 
hateful bird. 

For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her for- 
nication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with 
her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the 
abundance of her delicacies. 

And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of 
her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye re- 
ceive not of her plagues. 

For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered 
her iniquities. 

Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her 
double according to her works : in the cup which she hath filled fill 
to her double. 

How much she hath glorified herself, and 1 ved deliciously, so 



Gloria in Excelsis Domino. 505 

much torment and sorrow give her : for she saith in her heart, I sit a 
queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow 

Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourn- 
ing, and famine ; and she shall be utterly burned with fire : for strong 
is the Lord God who judgeth her. 

And the kings of the earth who have committed fornication and 
lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when 
they shall see the smoke of her burning. 

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, 
that great city ! for in one hour is thy judgment come ! 

And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her ; 
for no man buyeth their merchandise any more : 

The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and 
of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all 
sweet wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels 
of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble, 

And cinnamon and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and 
wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and 
horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men. 

And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, 
and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, 
and thou shalt find them no more at all. 

The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, 
shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing, 

And saying, Alas, alas, that great city, that was clothed in fine 
linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious 
stones, and pearls ! 

For in one hour so great riches is come to nought! And every 
shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many 
as trade by sea, stood afar off. 

All cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What 
city is like unto this great city ! 

And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wail- 
ing, saying, Alas, alas, that great city, wherein were made rich all 
that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness ! for in one hour 
is she made desolate ! 

Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets ; 
for God hath avenged you on her. 

And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and 
cast it into the sea saying, Thus with violence shall that great city 
Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all. 

And the voice of harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and 
trumpeters, shall be heard no more at all in thee ; 

And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee ; and 
the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more 
at all in thee : for thy merchants were the great men of the earth ; 
for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived. 



5°6 



Gloria in Excelsis Domino. 



And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and 
of all that were slain upon the earth. 

And after these things I heard a great voice of much people in 
heaven, saying, Alleluia, Salvation, and glory, and honor, and power, 
unto the Lord our God : 

For true and righteous are his judgments : for he hath judged the 
great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and 
hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand ! 

And again they said, Alleluia ! And her smoke rose up for ever 
and ever. 

And the four and twenty elders and the four beasts fell down 
and worshipped God that sat on the throne, saying, Amen ; Alle- 
luia ! 

And a voice came out of the throne, saying, Praise our God, 
all ye his servants, and ye that fear him, both small and great. 

And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as 
the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, 
saying, Alleluia : for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth ! 

Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him : for the 
marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself 
ready ! 

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth : for the first 
heaven and the first earth were passed away ; and there was no 
more sea. 

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down 
from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her hus- 
band. 

And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold the tab- 
ernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they 
shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be 
their God. 

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes ; and there 
shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall 
there be any more pain : for the former things are passed away. 

And there came unto me one of the seven angels — and talked 
with me saying, Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the 
Lamb's wife. 

And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high moun- 
tain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending 
out of heaven from God, having the Glory of God. 

And I saw no temple therein : for the Lord God Almighty and 
the Lamb are the temple of it. 

And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to 
shine in it : for the Glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is 
the light thereof. 



Gloria in Excelsis Domino. 507 

And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light 
of it : and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour 
into it. 

And the gates shall not be shut at all by day : for there shall be 
no night there. 

And they shall bring the glory and the honour of the nations into 
it. 

And there shall in no wise enter into it anything that defileth, 
neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie : but they 
which are written in the Lamb's book of life. 

And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, 
proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. 

In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, 
was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and 
yielded her fruit every month : and the leaves of the tree were 
for the healing of the nations. 

And there shall be no more curse : but the throne of God and 
of the Lamb shall be in it ; and his servants shall serve him : 

And they shall see his face ; and his name shall be in their fore- 
heads. 

And there shall be no night there ; and they need no candle, 
neither light of the sun ; for the Lord God giveth them light : and 
they shall reign for ever and ever. 

And he said unto me, These sayings are faithful and true. 

Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book, for the time is 
at hand. 

I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in 
the churches. I am the root and offspring of David ; the bright 
and morning star. 

And the spirit and the bride say, come ! And let him that hear- 
eth say, come ! And let him that is athirst come ; and whosoever 
will, let him take the water of life freely. — Revelation, xviii., 
xix., xxi., and xxii. chapters in part. 

The Lord shall reign forever, even thy God, O Zion ! unto all 
generations. Alleluia! — Psalm cxlvi., 10. 



APPENDIX. 



NOTE A. Page 149. 

I hope that none of my readers, more attentive to 
the sound than the sense of words, will suspect me of 
irreverence towards what is called " the moral law," 
meaning the law of the Ten Commandments. I certain- 
ly mean by " moral manhood " something quite distinct 
from that most real manhood which stands in our interior 
conscientious reverence for God's word. This is an ex- 
clusively spiritual manhood, because the purpose of the 
law (as might be argued simply from the negative tenor 
of its injunctions) being not to nourish pride in the 
votary but humility, not to confer righteousness but 
only to give a knowledge of sin, he who in his inter- 
course with it should find his moral character aggran- 
dized rather than diminished, would manifestly stamp 
the purpose of the law with folly. I mean by " moral 
manhood" that purely sensuous and fallacious judgment 
of ourselves and other men which imports that we are 
something in ourselves, or absolutely, and irrespective 
of our relations to our kind. Neither the Ten Com- 
mandments, nor any other Divine word, were ever de- 
signed to foster this insane pretension. Human pride 
and ignorance are sure to divide one man from another 
quite sufficiently : the Ten Commandments (or con- 
science) were given to us not to inflame this disunion 
but to obliterate it forever, by teaching those who are 



510 dppendioc. 

most prone to it, that all men, whatever be their moral 
or outward differences one from another, are spiritually 
of one blood in God's sight, being all alike full of inmost 
theft adultery cruelty and falsehood. 



NOTE B. Page 202. 

This is why the Divine love towards us naturally, is 
eternally active : because it can never be satisfied. It 
could be satisfied only in thoroughly delivering us from 
evil : but as such deliverance would involve the destruc- 
tion of our natural identity or self-consciousness, it neces- 
sarily restricts itself to the perpetual delight of subor- 
dinating our evil to its own good : so vivifying human 
history, or making it immortal. The same considera- 
tions explain too the reason why so many brutal husbands 
come to hate the wives who were once dear to them; 
for having no truer and deeper sympathy with them than 
this low bond of personal admiration or affection supplies, 
they no sooner find the persons of their wives legally 
made over to them in absolute possession, than their af- 
fection dies out. People of an interior quality accept the 
fact, and seek in each other a sacreder communion than 
they might otherwise perhaps have aspired to, a com- 
munion in all gentleness, forbearance, peace, and inno- 
cence. But the mass of men chafe under the disappoint- 
ment, and if they are men of disorderly lives, visit it 
upon their innocent companions, so exposing themselves 
to the vengeance of a community which is still too stu- 
pid to see, that it is only its own inhumanity which is 
primarily at fault. 



Appendix. 511 



NOTE C. Page 205. 

Morality, which is the demand of a personal right- 
eousness in man, finds its only true fulfilment, as Christ 
taught, in the social sentiment, the sentiment of human 
brotherhood. " Whoso does unto others as he would have 
others do unto him, fulfils all law and -prophecy" And 
clearly no one does this who does not cordially cherish 
or livingly obey the sentiment of human fellowship, of 
human equality. The moral history of the race has 
thus no end beyond the actual evolution of a universal 
human fellowship, the inauguration of a perfect society 
among men, in which each shall be deemed the exact 
equal of all the rest, and the entire social force conse- 
quently become the guarantee of the widest justice to 
every individual member. Foolish European popes and 
potentates think they may dodge this Divine destiny; 
and even our own miniature editions of these civic and 
ecclesiastic grandeurs feel that they too are called upon 
in their feeble duodecimo way to pooh-pooh it. But 
while He who sitteth in the heavens laughs at the for- 
mer, and has them in derision, He sees perfectly well 
that the latter will be most happy to accommodate them- 
selves to the popular aura on the subject, whenever 
wherever and however it shall manifest itself. It con- 
stitutes in fact the precise advance which our Church 
and State have made upon the European model of those 
institutions, that our priests, being destitute of all power 
God-ward, are unable to communicate any sacredness 
to our rulers man-ward. It is true that multitudes of 
people, having no conception of our approaching social 
expansion, fancy that we are Providentially destined to 
a much finer ecclesiastical and political development 
than has ever been known in Europe. The whole no- 
tion is intensely incongruous. We are utterly without 
a priesthood in the ecclesiastical sense of that institu- 
tion ; utterly without a government in the political sense 



512 appendix. 

of that institution. Ecclesiastically considered the priest 
is ordained to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins -> but 
there is no such fanatical pretension possible on the 
part of our plain shame-faced humane ministers. It 
does not legitimately exist outside of the catholic church, 
where it exists only as a tradition. Our priests are mere 
popular orators, having not the slightest authoritative 
claim upon any man's attention or regard, and depend- 
ing therefore for their influence solely upon their ability 
spiritually to interpret the great facts of history and of 
nature. And a government, in the political sense of that 
institution, does not exist as here wholly by the will of 
the governed, but by an alleged Divine right or appoint- 
ment antedating history, and attested by priestly conse- 
cration. Our priests have a much more exalted because 
more real ministry than their European types, which is 
that of educating the popular thought, and kindling the 
popular aspiration. And our rulers have a right indis- 
putably more Divine than is exhibited anywhere else, 
that of reflecting and carrying out the popular will which 
has been thus originated. In short we are prospectively 
for the first time in history a true human society or 
brotherhood, in which every man will be inwardly se- 
cure of Heaven's benediction, and outwardly secure of 
Nature's allegiance, by simple right of manhood alone. 



NOTE D. Page 209. 



We denounce the Romish church as inhuman for 
enjoining abstinence from marriage upon its " religious " 
orders ; but we enact the same inhumanity in making 
our converts believe the indulgence of their purely 
natural appetites and passions to be sinful, save in so far 
as it is conformed to an arbitrary conventional standard. 
The only true standard of purity for the sexual relations 



Appendix. 5 1 3 

is marriage; but then it is marriage inwardly as well 
as outwardly ratified, or reflecting the unforced re- 
ciprocal affection of its subjects. What our laws allow 
to be marriage is one thing, often a very nasty one ; 
what marriage is in itself, or to the apprehension of men 
who are somewhat advanced towards self-respect and 
respect for their kind, is quite another thing. Our laws 
for example, the laws of every so-called Christian coun- 
try, permit us to sell our daughters — provided only we 
employ a clergyman to gild the transaction with sacred 
words and call it a proper marriage — to any unclean 
wretch, steeped to the lips in practical atheism, whose 
pecuniary reputation enables him to buy them. What 
sort of purity between the sexes does marriage thus in- 
terpreted engender ? Let our brothels answer. Let 
the crowd of painted harlots answer, who make our 
Christian streets hideous every night with their skulking 
allurements. Let the annual sacrifice which Christen- 
dom offers up to the merciless Moloch of its civilization 
answer : the sacrifice of myriads of innocent unin- 
structed youth, victims of depraved appetite, of morbid 
self-indulgence, victims of that fierce incontinency in 
every form, which our persistent denial of God in Na- 
ture, and our insane abandonment of it to the devil, in- 
fallibly condemn them to. Let our popular newspapers 
answer, teeming as they do with the most prurient de- 
tails of conjugal infidelity ; with hints to clandestine 
commerce ; with enigmatic notifications of adulterous 
meetings ; with the advertisements of abortionists, and 
all the other insignia of a profitable traffic in obscenity. 
These are the fruits which legitimately inhere in our 
conventional marriage, and fitly express the ineffectual 
stink with which it inwardly reeks towards heaven. 

But that a truer marriage sentiment than this is being 
enkindled at this day by God's spirit in the bosom of univer- 
sal man, is known I hope to the experience of very many 
who read these lines : the sentiment of a unity so Divine 
between the sexes as must erelong utterly discharge their 
33 



5 1 4 Jppendix. 

commerce of that fierce libidinousness which has grown 
out of the past contemptuous suppression of one sex to 
the mere physical needs of the other, and redeem it to 
heavenly innocence and tenderness. This higher mar- 
riage sentiment is not born of outward want but of in- 
ward fulness ; for it rigidly presupposes such an advance 
in human society or brotherhood, as will have lifted 
every man out of that degrading vassalage to Nature 
which has hitherto characterized him, and restored him 
once more to the exclusive allegiance of God and his 
fellows. The existing legal administration of marriage 
contemplates the institution not as a means for the high- 
est possible humanization of the parties to it, so much 
as a sluice for our natural lusts. A man enters into matri- 
mony because he cannot otherwise reputably compass the 
gratification of his grossest necessities. In this way the 
marriage sentiment has become so hopelessly degraded 
to the popular understanding, that there are few persons 
who do not believe that the institution is destitute of any 
internal or spiritual bonds, being kept in honor exclu- 
sively by the legal sanctions which separate it from har- 
lotry. With such men chastity means the literal obser- 
vance of law, though the total spirit of it be habitually 
and foully violated. But all this is simply preposterous. 
True virtue or manhood is never literal or legal, but al- 
ways spiritual. It stands in no amount of conformity 
to established usage, but only in the spirit which dictates 
such conformity, whether a spirit of freedom or one of 
self-seeking. There is no such thing as a virtuous or vi- 
cious act in itself, and apart from the temper of the actor. 
Man alone is virtuous or vicious, and his action is one or 
the other, only as it is colored by his personality. Thus 
chastity is not an act, it is the spirit from which every 
action should proceed. There is no such thing as an 
act of chastity, but only acts of uncleanness. All our 
acts are alike acts of uncleanness, until they are re- 
deemed by that spirit of chastity which is incessantly 
vivifying us inwardly from God. The true marriage 






Jppendix. 5 1 5 

sentiment is first spiritual, and carnal only by derivation 
from that ; so that the identical acts which would be 
unchaste when begotten of another spirit, become now 
the home of chastity. In truth the sentiment is so in- 
wardly inflamed by God's spotless love : it is in its es- 
sence or origin so interior a friendship, so profound a 
bosom fellowship and correspondence between man and 
woman, that every form of its existence or outgoing is 
of necessity chaste. To impose outward restraints 
upon it : to say to it, thou shalt not do this or that : 
is simply to ignore its Divine genesis, and miscon- 
ceive its essential innocence. It is like forbidding 
defilement to lilies, ostentation to violets, ferocity to 
doves, or duplicity to sheep. Of its own essential nature 
the sentiment abhors nothing more than the reciprocal 
license and profanation which even our best conven- 
tional conjugality permits to its subjects ; and it has 
consequently no more assured result than ultimately to 
recover the now blackened and burnt-up earth of its 
abode, to the stainless peace and truth and purity of 
heaven. 

It is this new and better marriage sentiment in the 
popular bosom, which authoritatively claims to itself the 
purification of the sexual instinct ; which bids us hence- 
forward teach our children that that instinct was never 
given for its own sake, but only as the transitory earth 
of an enduring heaven ; only to base a spiritual charac- 
ter or manhood in them which shall be vital with God's 
inmost infinitude. It is never right knowledge which 
corrupts or perverts our action ; much more have we 
to dread that systematic ignorance upon the sacredest 
topics which is enforced as a prop to our established su- 
perstitions. " Well-stated knowledge," says Dr. Wil- 
kinson in his sensible preface to Swedenborg's treatise 
on the Organs of Generation, " did never yet contrib- 
ute to human inflammation ; and we much question 
whether the whole silver-spade story with which we 
put off our children's queries about our whence be not 



516 Appendix. 

theoretically fallacious ; and whether children should 
not be told the truth from the first ; that before desire 
and imagination are born, the young mind may receive 
in its cool innocency the future objects of powers and 
faculties which are to be subject afterwards to such 
strong excitements." Especially is this true when we 
give our children habitually to know that all their natu- 
ral life is a most strict education for a better one, and 
that there is accordingly no passion or appetite of their 
nature which this Divine use does not inmostly sanctify, 
does not render infinitely holy and sweet. Is that a sort 
of knowledge to inflame the imagination, or lead to the 
abuse of nature ? That the healthful use of our natural 
organs would thereby be promoted, is highly probable ; 
and so far am I from dissimulating the probability that I 
truly rejoice in it. For the only salvation for us as a 
race — our sole chance of resuscitation to immortal pu- 
rity and health — is, that coming at last to practise what 
we now only preach, viz. that the Most High dwelleth 
NOT in temples made with hands, we turn from the pom- 
pous and illusory shrines whither so many resort for the 
indulgence of a morbid devotion, for the enjoyment at 
best of an imaginary holy moment, and consent to rec- 
ognize God's living altar, the only visible shrine of His 
holiness, in the hitherto defaced deformed and degraded 
human body : which being thus for the first time in- 
wardly consecrated and made spontaneously submissive 
to its Divine ends and uses, will put on sweetness, health, 
and beauty, with the day, and carry gospel marrow and 
fatness into every lean and famished place of God's do- 
minion. The use of our natural faculties is far more 
outraged by their wilful disuse than by their habitual 
abuse. Disuse utterly disorganizes and destroys the fac- 
ulty ; abuse only enfeebles it. Both are bad ; only one 
is irremediable. 

Appetite and passion never exert a controlling and 
therefore degrading influence, until they have been ren- 
dered fierce by some foolish asceticism, some silly vol- 



Jppendix. J J 7 

untary humility on our part, or some accidental starva- 
tion. Reduce the appetites to a famished condition, 
imprison them as you do a tiger, allowing them only a 
stinted measure of nutriment, or so much as they can 
compass clandestinely, and of course you insure them the 
tiger's force and ferocity. Thus the unhappy and un- 
handsome monk, who from some spiritual insanity, some 
morbid ambition to achieve an extraordinary personal 
holiness, or a greater nearness to God than common 
people enjoy, sets himself to deny and starve out the 
most honorable and benignant of our natural appetites, 
often finds his interior thought polluted by the most un- 
clean images, and his whole life turned into a sordid 
conflict with the basest of concupiscences : a conflict 
from which happily there is no deliverance but in the 
renunciation of his proud and delusive spiritual aims. 
But in their ordinary normal aspect, when they are not 
bedevilled by some unseen ghostly interference, growing 
out of this ambition of a preternatural personal sanctity, 
out of some accidental famine, or other coerced depri- 
vation of their liberty, the natural appetites and passions 
are a solace and refreshment to our spiritual faculties, 
rather than a burden. Above all things would they be 
so, if we once admitted them to the sunshine of God's 
recognition ; if, clothed with His smile and restored to 
their right mind by His cordial benediction, they were 
permitted henceforth to sit undisturbed at His feet: i. e. 
fulfil unimpeded those external or organic uses upon 
which the inmost sanity of our hearts and minds is con- 
tingent. 

Multitudes of thoughtful people are asking themselves 
the question : How the merely human letter of marriage 
is going to be brought at last into harmony with its 
truly Divine spirit ; so compelling our romancers and 
dramatists to find elsewhere the theme of their tragic or 
comic inspiration. Of course it never can be done ex- 
cept by legislatively freeing the institution of everything 
that practically tends to make it a byword and hissing. 



5i 8 



Appendix. 



The institution of paternity once gave the father an ab- 
solute property in his child, irrespective of God's prior 
claims. The relation is still administered indeed in a 
very faulty way ; but the fault lies manifestly in the 
poverty and imbecility of our existing social methods, 
and does not attribute itself to the heart of the parent. 
For time has been gradually modifying the institution 
into less absolute or more spiritual form, so that it is a 
rare thing now to see any very gross abuse of paternal 
power, any very gross constraint of the child's rightful 
freedom. No sensible man would now maintain the 
child's obligation to love or serve a parent, who should 
put himself in habitually unlovely relations to the child, 
or violate his instinctive self-respect. In a word the 
sanctity of the child in a social estimation is becoming 
recognized as quite equal to that of the parent, and the 
sentiment of paternity consequently is losing much of 
the ferocity which characterized it, when the father felt 
his responsibility wholly unshared and unrelieved by so- 
ciety. 

Our traditional marriage-customs in like manner en- 
dow the husband with a property which is still much too 
absolute in the person of his wife, and which infallibly 
conflicts with God's higher claim upon her allegiance. 
They bind the wife, that is to say, to love and serve the 
husband without regard to his character ; though he 
should inflict every conceivable outrage upon her indeed, 
short of technical infidelity. The unquestionable claim 
of God upon every human heart is, that it shall love 
Him supremely, and the neighbor subordinately ; that it 
shall first of all acknowledge the infinite or what is of 
God in the neighbor, and afterwards the finite, or what 
is of the neighbor himself. Now God's supreme mani- 
festation of Himself, as we have seen or shall see in the 
text, is in our individuality^ or characteristic worth : so 
that character in another is what we are supremely 
bound to love and cherish. Subordinately to this we 
may do the amplest justice to the person's temperament, 






Appendix. 519 

or natural gifts : to his genius, his intellect, his wit, his 
piety, his humor, his energy, his manners : and abound 
in tender pity to his infirmities. But our primary alle- 
giance is due irresistibly to his character, or to the spirit 
with which his various gifts are exercised. We cannot 
love a person who is characteristically unlovely : that is 
to say, who does not more or less honestly cultivate a 
spiritual approximation to the Divine spirit. And we 
have no business therefore to bind a wife to her husband 
absolutely, and irrespectively of his character. We can 
only do this at the risk of her own spiritual degradation, 
and God almighty will sweep all our civic and religious 
sanctities into the dust-hole of men's contempt, long 
before He will consent to the jeoparding of that interest 
in any one. 

What then is the remedy ? How shall we reinstate 
marriage in men's reverence, and rescue it from the 
purely hypocritical patronage it receives at the hands of 
our swarming scribes and Pharisees ? The answer is 
very simple, namely : by leaving the institution more in 
woman's keeping, and less in man's ; by making her 
most answerable for its honor, who is most interested in 
its stability. I am firmly persuaded that all our exist- 
ing evils in the conjugal sphere, and all the disorder 
consequent upon these evils in the sphere of the sexual 
relations generally, are owing to the fact, that man's 
influence in the administration of marriage is still unhap- 
pily so paramount, and woman's so subordinate. And 
the only remedy consequently for these evils and disor- 
ders, is, that our legislators proceed at once and boldly 
to equalize the relation of the wife to the husband in the 
conjugal bond, by suspending divorce upon the prayer of 
the wife alone. Nothing short of this will equalize the 
relation of the sexes, or enable the woman to evince 
that incontestable spiritual priority in the realm of senti- 
ment with which God and nature have endowed her, 
and which has hitherto been kept in wrongful and rigid 
abeyance to man's material priority. The wife is not 



520 dppendix. 

at present the equal of her husband conjugally, because, 
being by nature less brutal than he, less prone to sensu- 
ality, she is vastly more at the mercy of his caprice and 
infidelity. What is manifestly wanted then is, that the 
higher or spiritual element in the conjugal relation rep- 
resented by the wife, be released from its immemorial 
domination by the lower or material element represented 
by the husband, and invested with its rightful Divine 
primacy. If the honor of marriage were thus legisla- 
tively confided to woman, as it assuredly must be ere- 
long under penalty of dying out altogether, we should 
then see for the first time in history, a practical admin- 
istration of the institution which would not only vindi- 
cate the strict divinity of its origin, and the rightful 
spirituality of its sanctions, but would infallibly concil- 
iate also the unaffected love and homage of all mankind. 



NOTE E. Page 236. 



I knew a gentleman some years ago of exemplary 
religiosity and politeness, but of a seasoned inward du- 
plicity, who failed in business as was supposed fraudu- 
lently. He was in the habit of meeting one of the 
largest of his creditors every Sunday on his way to 
church, where his own voice was always among the 
most melodious to confess any amount of abstract sins 
and iniquities ; and he never failed to raise his hat from 
his head as he passed, and testify by every demonstra- 
tive flourish how much he would still do for the bare 
forms of friendship, when its life or substance was fled. 
The creditor was long impatient, but at last grew fran- 
tic under this remorseless courtesy, and stopping his 
debtor one day told him that he would cheerfully aban- 
don to him the ten thousand dollars he had robbed him 
of, provided he would forego the exhibition of so much 



Appendix. 52 1 

nauseous politeness. Sir, replied the imperturbable 
scamp, I would not forego the expression of my duty to 
you when we meet, for twice ten thousand dollars ! This 
is very much our case religiously. Whereas if we would 
only give over our eternal grimacing and posturing, only 
leave off our affable but odious ducking and bowing to 
our great creditor, long enough to see the real truth of 
the case, and frankly acknowledge bankruptcy utter 
and fraudulent, nothing could be so hopeful. The su- 
preme powers are infinitely above reckoning with us for 
our shortcomings, if we would only have the manli- 
ness to confess spiritual insolvency, and not seek any 
longer to hide it from their eyes and our own, under 
these transparent monkey-shines of a mock devotion ; 
under this perpetual promise to pay which never comes 
to maturity, but gets renewed from Sunday to Sunday 
in secula seculorum. God does not need our labored 
civility, and must long ere this have sickened of our 
vapid doffing of the hat to him as we pass. He 
seeks our solid advantage, not our ridiculous patronage. 
He desires our living not our professional humility ; 
and He desires it only for our sakes not His own. 
He would fashion us into the similitude of His perfect 
love, only that we might enjoy the unspeakable delights 
of His sympathetic fellowship. If He once saw us to 
be thus spontaneously disposed towards Him, thus gen- 
uinely qualified for the immortal participation of His 
power and blessedness, He would I am sure be more 
than content never to get a genuflexion from us again 
while the world lasted, nor hear another of our dreary 
litanies while sheep bleat and calves bellow. 



522 Appendix. 



NOTE F. Page 240. 

Swedenborg describes "the world of spirits" (as he 
calls it, which intervenes between " the spiritual world " 
proper and the natural world) as being the seat and 
source of all our moral power. Thence descend all 
those tiny streams of influence which have hitherto fer- 
tilized the moral world. The pope of Rome on earth 
is a lifeless puppet compared with the inflated substance 
which fills and rules the Rome of the world of spirits ; 
and the Russian czar and the German emperors and 
the British kings, and the European despots universally, 
together with the bustling " little corporal " who stung 
them all to madness, are only so many futile wire-pulled 
manikins beside the grim originals of that remorseless 
inner sphere. Thus, when we die, we wake without 
any shock or lapse of consciousness in a world perfectly 
conformed to our ideal. If — believing that God does 
really commit His honor to another — we have been 
wont to swear by some renowned Stagirite, by some 
infallible apostle Paul, by some ponderous Kant, or 
authoritative Swedenborg, we shall find in that world 
plenty of pretenders to that sanctified repute, and be 
dragged through gutters enow before we learn a needful 
self-respect, if we wilfully conceive that human life 
thrives best under despotism civil and religious, we shall 
have a chance of realizing both of these advantages to 
our heart's desire. If we persuade ourselves that 
heaven consists in going to Paris and draining the cup 
of pleasure to the dregs, we find there a Paris perfectly 
accommodated to our will, and bring up finally in hos- 
pitals whose surgery leaves nothing in the way of skill 
to be desiderated. If we have convinced ourselves, as 
some of our divines and politicians labor to do, that 
slavery is a Divinely ordained condition for men of a 
darker hue outwardly than we are, and full therefore of an 
interior blessedness to all who religiously undergo it, we 



dppendix. 523 

shall have the amplest opportunities of essaying that 
Divine blessedness also ; for white becomes black and 
black white in that world without the slightest observa- 
tion. 

Spiritually to be a white man means to be clad with 
innocence and peace ; means to be incapable of serving 
oneself at another's expense : as spiritually to be a black 
man means to be armed with violence and deceit, and 
ever ready to seek our own will by coercing or seducing 
that of others. Thus there are myriads of men natu- 
rally white who are spiritually as black as soot, and who 
will rise up after death in that world where soul creates 
body, with hair as crisp, lips as thick, and noses as flat, 
as any Cuffee of our southern rice-fields : and what is 
very wonderful, these conceited, because self-made, 
" niggers " will never doubt that their ebony is your 
only veritable mother-of-pearl. Ah ! that mediatorial 
or purgatorial world ! what miracles it will noiselessly 
work ! what crookednesses it will straighten ! what in- 
equalities it will rectify ! Swedenborg saw many per- 
sons there who had been very majestic characters indeed 
on earth, renowned for all sorts of conventional sanctity 
and ability, and who yet had cultivated so little their in- 
stincts of human brotherhood here, as spiritually to ex- 
hibit no evidence of corporeity beyond a slight mass 
of hair and a few glittering teeth ! Let my reader 
and me beware of following any multitude whatever 
to do evil, although that multitude should occupy all 
the pulpits and all the forums in the land, and have 
power even to put us in the White House at Washing- 
ton. For after all the White House is worth only a 
four years' shelter to any one, and has already become, 
according to the best statistics, so befouled by unworthy 
occupation, as to be an altogether dubious forecourt 
of those mansions, undefiled and incorruptible, which 
are alone worth our reasonable aspiration. 



524 Appendix. 



NOTE G. Page 346. 

Here let me take occasion to remind any reader 
whose literary prejudices may be shocked by my want 
of reverence for accredited names, that we can in no 
way so poignantly affront the great light of Truth which 
enlightens every man that comes into the world, as by 
practically allowing every renowned Tom Dick and 
Harry a patent-right as it were to its rays. There can 
be no monopoly of wisdom where each of us is at best 
but a learner or receiver, never a teacher or giver : and 
surely no a priori obligation can be shown why any spe- 
cific person should be with respect to any other specific 
person either right or wrong. There are no papacies 
in the realm of knowledge but only in that of estab- 
lished ignorance and superstition ; and it is high time 
for men of discernment to be ashamed of that servile 
ducking to success, which is fast turning the literary 
arena into a nauseous Flunkeydom. Truth confers 
upon her followers the only legitimate dignity they pos- 
sess, and was never known to accept a tittle from them. 
It is moreover extremely puerile to need reminding that 
however it may fare in mundane pursuits, it is yet never 
true in spiritual things that the race is to the swift, or 
the battle to the strong. Human prudence is a syno- 
nyme of Divine Providence only to low minds, only to 
men whose ends are so purely selfish as to necessitate 
the most niggardly conceptions possible of the Divine 
administration. That literary men should lend them- 
selves to reflect such living oracles as these, and com- 
placently repeat that " to fear God and keep your pow- 
der dry" are recommendations of equal value, only 
proves that literary men have renounced the spiritual 
traditions of the race, and have swung round to the old 
Pagan conception of Deity as a respecter of persons. 
Literature in fact (and this is the tendency of all the 
merely Fine Arts) has sunk from a power into a flat- 



Jppendix. 525 

terer of power, from a substance into a shadow, from a 
life into a memory ; feeding so contentedly upon the 
garbage of personalities and growing so gross upon the 
diet, that one would say her true vocation had always 
been mere maid-of-all-work to the booksellers. 



NOTE H. Page 457. 

The strict relation of maternity which science bears 
to our intellectual personality, is strikingly exhibited 
in that giddiness or qualmishness which seizes the 
mind, when it has begun to be spiritually quickened, in 
view of the warring tumultuous sea of facts which sci- 
ence endeavors to reduce to order. Sea-sickness is but 
a type of the loathing and dejection which beset the 
philosophic stomach, when set adrift upon this restless 
heaving ocean of knowledge, with no more command- 
ing foothold of doctrine, than is supplied by what men 
call Cl the laws of nature." These so-called laws of 
nature, far from inhering in nature, exert a controlling 
power over her, and hence can only be conceived 
of as reflected from some higher source, which is the 
mind of man. Mere men of science themselves, like 
Comte, are beginning to reverberate this philosophic 
instinct. They too declare that these so-called " laws 
of nature " are not any substantive forces or entities 
discoverable in nature, but only certain convenient har- 
bors or anchorages which the mind itself constructs 
against the dreary and disgusting diffuseness of natural 
fact. 

But in truth what we call "the laws of nature" are 
the mind itself in its most general or bodily form, u e. 
its least individual and spiritual form. For the mind has 
a generic unity as well as a specific one ; a common 
form as well as a particular one ; a public evolution as 



526 Jppendix. 

well as a private one ; a natural existence as well as a 
spiritual one : and this common or public form must be 
wrought out to its full measure of expansion, before the 
individual or private form can perfectly realize itself, or 
becomes adequately empowered for its own spiritual 
functions. The various sciences, each aiming in its 
own sphere to express or bring out the spiritual unity 
which underlies all natural variety, are only so many 
partial embodiments of this great mental corporeity of 
the race, which will be completely illustrated only by 
the great mother-science which litters all the special 
sciences, namely : the science of human society or 
brotherhood. Any attempt accordingly to explicate 
Nature by what we call " the laws of nature " is 
sheerly preposterous. It in fact suspends such expli- 
cation upon a previous knowledge of the laws of the 
human mind : i. e. postpones its only accurate issue 
to the advent of a true philosophy of history, which 
alone exhibits the perfect structure of the mind. To 
investigate Nature by her own light consequently, or 
without some previous and commanding doctrine of 
Man connecting her with God, is like putting to sea 
without a compass. Every such inconsiderate adven- 
turer is tossed mountain-high on the waves of uncer- 
tainty ; his frail bark is driven hither and thither by all 
the fierce winds of contending doctrine ; dark clouds 
of controversy incessantly obscure the pole-star of truth 
to his eye ; and the distracted wanderer soon learns that 
without supernatural help and guidance, he will never 
again touch the friendly shore, nor clasp wife and chil- 
dren to his bosom more. 



Jppendix. 527 



NOTE I. Page 470. 

The notion here denounced is the latent inspiration 
of much of our modern theologic speculation. In Dr. 
Bushnell's popular book on Nature and the Supernatural, 
which stands in the same relation to our ordinary charac- 
teristic theology that an ox fed on oil-cake does to average 
beef, it vomits forth jets of lurid flame menacing desola- 
tion to every green thing left in the land. How impos- 
sible to read Dr. B.'s book, where this diabolic fantasy 
of a moral righteousness is seen shaping the universe 
according to its own lust, and where accordingly not 
only man but God himself is pictured endlessly strain- 
ing himself out of all Divine peace and innocence in 
order to achieve some still unachieved moral distinction, 
without a menace of universal tetanus creeping over one 
vividly distressing to contemplate ! Who can imagine 
one of these high-strung, ravenous, sinewy aspirants after 
personal perfection, whom Dr. Bushnell delights to 
paint as God's true children, because he supposes God 
himself to be mainly intent on that sort of perfection, 
without getting a very near presentiment of the devil ? 
To think of a set of high-stepping, ring-boned, spavined, 
self-righteous wretches like these ever becoming " as 
little children ! " It would be easier it seems to me for 
a whole caravan of camels to go through a needle's 
eye. 

According to Swedenborg the Last Judgment of God 
in nature is specifically intended to brush away these 
moralistic cobwebs from the mind, and save unwary flies 
from getting spiritually entangled. The last judgment, he 
says, which took place in the world of spirits about a 
century since, and which abundantly explains the enor- 
mous strides the world has been making- since in the 
way of freedom and the consequent development of in- 
dustry, " was executed only upon those who were ex- 
ternally moral, but internally not spiritual. It was not 



528 dppendix. 

executed upon those in heaven or those in hell ; but 
only upon those who were in the middle between heaven 
and hell, and had there made to themselves factitious 
heavens." 1 These are the goats mentioned in Matthew 
25, who say Lord, Lord, but do nothing of what the 
Lord spiritually enjoins. They do their works to be seen 
of men. They say and do not. They shut the kingdom 
of heaven against others^ but do not go in themselves. 
They make clean the outside of the cup and platter^ etc., 
etc. This is the Babylon of Isaiah and the Apocalypse 
which is cast down into hell, and made a hereditary pos- 
session of the bittern. 

The reason why people of this order were preserved 
and tolerated unto the day of the last judgment, is be- 
cause they who imitate spiritual life in externals or make 
it visible in a moral life, impress the vulgar favorably, 
and so lead numbers of the simple to a life of good, 
while they themselves are inwardly ravening wolves : 
for the simple in heart look no further than the external 
or what meets the eyes. Hence all such people were 
tolerated in the world of spirits from the commence- 
ment of the Christian church until the Last Judgment. 
These are understood in the Apocalypse by those who 
are not of the first resurrection. They lived in the 
world in external not in internal sanctity. They were 
just and sincere for the sake of civil and moral laws, 
but not for the sake of Divine laws. They filled vari- 
ous offices and did uses but not for the sake of uses. 
These and all throughout the world like them consti- 
tuted the first heaven. It was such a heaven as the 
world and church upon earth is, among those who do 
good not for good's sake, but from fear of" the laws, 
and the loss of reputation honor and wealth. Men 
of this sort, whose external sanctity, whose prating 
[sermonicatio] about Divine things, and whose sincerities, 
for their own sake and that of the world, give them an 
air of spirituality which imposes on the mass, rush into 
1 Doctrine of Faith, 64. 



Appendix. 529 

every kind of abomination when external restraints are 
loosed. So long as there were congregations of such 
spirits between heaven and the world, or between the 
Lord and the church, man was unable to be enlight- 
ened ; for all illumination comes to man from the Lord 
by an inward way, and these morbid accumulations in 
the world of spirits cut off the Divine influx as the 
beams of the sun are cut off by a black interposing 
cloud. And since accordingly all these interposing spir- 
itual clouds have been dissipated by that Divine opera- 
tion in the world of spirits or the interiors of the mind 
which is called the Last Judgment, the communication 
between heaven and the world, or the Lord and the 
church, has been restored. To outward appearance 
the state of the world may remain unchanged ; divided 
churches may continue to exist. But henceforth the 
man of the church will be in a more free state of think- 
ing on matters of faith, or spiritual things which relate 
to heaven, because spiritual liberty has been restored to 
hi?n. For all things in the heavens and hells 
are now reduced into order ; and everything har- 
monic with or opposite to Divine ideas inflowed only 
from those spheres. The angels have slender hope of 
the men of the Christian church welcoming this restored 
liberty, but much of some nation far removed from the 
Christian world [about 3000 miles, shall we say ?], which 
nation is such that it is capable of receiving spiritual 
light, and of being made a celestial spiritual man ; and 
they said that at this day interior Divine Truths are re- 
vealed in that nation, and received in life and heart, and 
that it worships the Lord (livingly of course). See the 
Treatise on the Last "Judgment, 59—74 ; and Continua- 
tion, 10-16. 

I am sincere in the opinion that Swedenborg's an- 
gels may have squinted towards this side of the At- 
lantic when they expressed their hope in reference to 
the new or living church. We were then territorially 
far remote from Christendom, which properly compre- 
34 



53° appendix. 

hends only the seat of the Roman empire, and were 
already beginning to experience in a very decided man- 
ner that interior or spiritual remoteness, that new-born 
social force in humanity, which erelong resulted in our 
complete political and ecclesiastical enfranchisement 
from Europe. Of course when the angels talk of 
remoteness they have no idea of distance in space and 
time, but only of difference in affection and thought : 
that is to say, of spiritual remoteness : so that by a na- 
tion far removed from the Christian world, they can 
only mean a political constitution so distinct from that 
which prevails in Christendom as permits a larger ac- 
cess of spiritual life to the people, a larger influx of the 
spirit of human fellowship. Undoubtedly at the time 
Swedenborg was enjoying his instructive and pleasant 
commerce with angelic spirits, we were still European 
colonies : but no one familiar with our colonial history 
has here to learn, that the principle of popular sov- 
ereignty which constitutes our political difference from 
the polities of the old world, germinated as vigorously 
in the colonial conscience, as it has since flowered and 
fructified in the national one. What separates us toto 
ccelo from Europe is our constitutional recognition of 
popular sovereignty, so that we have absolutely no me- 
diation left between us and God, absolutely no priest- 
hood and no royalty. The priest is now clearly seen, 
by every one of the least spiritual culture, never to have 
been anything else than a symbol or figure of the un- 
recognized Divine good in the universe of man's heart ; 
and the king to have been only a figure of the unrecog- 
nized Divine truth in the universe of man's understand- 
ing. No doubt a dense shadow of Europe has managed 
to project itself upon our soil. The intellectual igno- 
rance we have been under with respect to our proper 
destiny which is exclusively social, has led us in great 
part to imagine ourselves little more than a legitimate 
spawn of European institutions, popularly modified ; so 
that a federative Church, made up of any number of 



Appendix. 531 

competitive and reciprocally wrangling sects, and a 
federative Polity, made up of any number of competi- 
tive and reciprocally hostile States, have had power to 
lift their bewildered heads, and obscure for a time to the 
popular consciousness its own rigidly humanitary temper 
and aims. 

Do I complain of these things r God forbid ! For 
otherwise we must have lacked that Providential impul- 
sion in our rear, which seems to have been necessary to 
00 .overbalance our habitual poltroonery, and call forth 
our latent manhood to the extent of making us willing 
at last to envisage, intellectually, the possibilities of our 
great destiny. If we had not reproduced in our shabby 
futile way the European experience, or tried for our- 
selves what could be made of Churchman and States- 
man, we should never have known the abysses of in- 
famy and imbecility they officially include, and might 
still be looking back with regret to the flesh-pots of 
Europe. \"\ e have now forever ended that folly. Vk e 
have tried Church and State under fairer auspices — so 
far as any embarrassment from routine or precedent is 
concerned — than they have ever enjoyed before: and 
whither have they brought us? If you demand the 
exac: measure of their significance, look around you. 
For i: is these men alone, our most respected Church- 
man and Statesman, who have brought us at last as a 
people to mutual slaughter. 

Of course we inherited Slavery. It preexisted in the 
::y, always patiently soliciting God's final judgment 
and disposal of it. But God is most truly the Lord, 
and is consequently unable to do anything in the way 
or abating iniquity upon the earth, except in concur- 
rence with the nature He has forever associated to 
His own. All evil has its birth from the heart of man, 
and it can be permanently put away therefore only by 
a spiritual operation of God in the heart of mankind, 
disposing us freely to loathe and renounce our habitual 
injustice a::a cove:oasness. Thus the process 0; God's 



53 2 Jppendix. 

judgment against evil is always gradual no doubt, being 
contingent altogether upon the enlargement of man's 
social conscience ; but there was no need that it should 
ever be vindictive, or assume the gigantic dimensions it 
has now assumed in the slaveholders' rebellion, except 
what arose from our pig-headed conceit and obduracy. 
Our people were innocent of the introduction of sla- 
very. God had no quarrel with them therefore in re- 
gard to its existence. He needed of course their con- 
sent and concurrence to put it definitively away from 
human sight ; and he invited such consent and concur- 
rence by the medium of the Moses and the Joshua who 
had led them out of European bondage. Accordingly 
the people had only to impose a brief repression upon 
their baser instincts, by deliberately affixing a prospec- 
tive period to the existence of the curse, in order to 
insure its peaceful decease, and a subsequent career to 
themselves of unlimited social progress and order. 

What prevented, and alone prevented, this issue ? 
Was it the invention of the cotton-gin, as I have heard 
some of our very blackest sheep affirm ? What non- 
sense ! The cotton-gin might have been invented fifty 
times over, inflaming the wildest cupidity of hearts with- 
out mercy, and yet no stain would have come upon our 
national life and character, had not our churchmen and 
statesmen remorselessly disowned what little honesty 
had ever sanctified their several callings. They were 
the' recognized and accepted interpreters of the popular 
conscience. The clergyman was there for no other 
purpose under heaven than to avouch God's unsullied 
altar in the instincts of the popular heart. The politi- 
cian was there for no other purpose than to maintain 
God's omnipotent throne in the convictions of the pop- 
ular understanding. And consequently if these men — 
especially the former — had not been both ready and 
eager to betray their majestic trust : if, armed with the 
authority which our traditional conscience still conceded 
to their office, they had even once manfully confronted 



Appendix. 533 

the waves of cupidity which were deluging the popular 
conscience, and said in the name of God, Peace, be 
still ! the waves and the sea would have hastened to 
obey them. But no, they greedily bent themselves to 
inflame the lust of the commercial bosom ; the one, by 
devoutly perverting the letter of God's word to the 
sanctification of slavery 5 the other, by blackening the 
name and menacing the life of every clean and honest 
man in the land, whose eyes had been Divinely opened 
to discern, and whose tongue had been Divinely loosed 
to scourge, our prevalent clerical hypocrisy, and the bla- 
tant political effrontery which was consequent upon it. 
All that was grovelling and beastly in the uncultivated 
popular heart smelt at and snuffed up the monstrous 
temptation. But the beast still owned a master ; and 
if that master had not himself cordially abjured his 
mastership, and voluntarily descended to the beast's 
own level, accepting henceforth its alliance and guid- 
ance, its fierce red jaws would have smacked and wa- 
tered to no purpose, its rampant libidinous tail have 
drooped, at once, submissive to the dust. 

It fills me then with unspeakable adoration of the 
majestic Providence in whose hand are all the ways of 
men, that our churchmen and statesmen have thus been 
allowed utterly to play out the latent and puny treachery 
to God and man with which their office has from the 
beginning of history been inwardly full ; and that we 
are henceforth delivered from all pretence of any fur- 
ther human mediation between the most High and the 
humblest of His creatures. We have henceforth but 
one mediator, who by one offering has forever purified 
the consciences of all who come unto God by him ; 
and we shall no longer tolerate any delegation of his 
authority. The clergyman or the politician who seeks 
our praise in the future, has but one way to achieve it ; 
that is, he must overcome by his proper humanitary 
genius the righteous odium into which his office has 
popularly and irrevocably sunken. He will derive no 



534 Appendix. 

consideration from his office, not one particle : but will 
owe it all to the strict fidelity with which he personally 
reproduces and reflects God's vital sanctity and power 
in the realm of human affection and human thought. 
We have no longer, so far as the distinctively popular 
intelligence is concerned, any belief in a Deity out of 
the conditions of human nature, or incommensurate with 
its powers and possibilities : at all events we can afford 
to be extremely indifferent to such a deity : and we 
insist therefore by an infallible instinct of God's living 
presence in our bosoms, that we shall henceforth permit 
no religious ministry, which does not before all things 
else authenticate God's great gospel of peace on earth 
and good will towards all mankind, nor any po- 
litical ministry, which does not give Freedom the sway 
— the universal sway — in human affairs, which has 
been hitherto usurped by diabolic Force. 

The slaveholders' rebellion, with all the blood and 
all the treasure it has cost, is yet a cheap purchase of 
these magnificent results ; because they are spiritual 
and produce fruit to eternity. The two things that 
separated between God and man, forever fossilizing the 
latter's conscience, and deadening the former's quick- 
ening power, were the priest and the policeman, the 
Church and the State. These two things have now be- 
come stigmatized with such an ineffaceable Divine con- 
tempt and oblivion, that they will no longer retard but 
only promote the advent of our social destiny. Before 
the rebellion broke out, almost every name of honor in 
our politics, our literature, and even our science, cringed 
meekly to the slaveholder's lash, and kissed the feet of 
his insolent and vulgar rapacity. There was to be sure 
a Fremont, who was a candidate for popular favor ; 
there were a Sumner and a Seward in the Senate ; a 
Wilson, a Giddings, and others in the House ; none of 
whom had bowed the knee to Baal. But these men 
were never in office, because absolutely no man had any 
chance of political distinction who did not abjectly 



Appendix. 535 

truckle to Slavery. Literature boasted the generous 
warmth of Lowell and Whittier, and lent her noble 
Emerson and well-beloved Curtis to the sacred cause. 
Greeley and Bryant in the secular press won immortal 
laurels by their fervid constancy to truth, while Bacon 
and Leavitt and Thompson performed the same thank- 
less service in the religious press. But as a general 
thing, politics, literature, and the press were utterly subsi- 
dized, and no sign of a better day, but only of an ever- 
deepening night, met the eye until the assault upon 
Fort Sumter. What an enormous — what a Divine 
change — has flashed upon the country since that auspi- 
cious hour ! What a stifling air had we breathed be- 
fore ! With what a bellying volume our lungs now 
unreef themselves to catch every breath of God's awak- 
ening gale ! And as yet two years have barely passed ! 
But there was a lower deep of degradation possible, 
and to this of course our clergy were bound to descend, 
because the previous elevation of their position gave a 
deeper impetus to their fall. Our politicians, our litera- 
teurs^ our men of science, kissed the feet of the slave- 
holding aristocracy, and had what reward they craved. 
But our clergymen almost to a man servilely kissed the 
feet of these degraded men of politics, literature, and 
science, and derided the pretension of men to discover 
any law of God which such caitiffs as these had not 
previously ratified. That is to say our clergy almost to 
a man denied the spirituality of God's law, and insisted 
upon shutting up man's allegiance to the bare letter of 
any constitution which human wit might fashion, and 
human lust falsify. Dr. Channing stood erect, Dr. 
Pierpont, Dr. Cheever, Theodore Parker, Theodore 
Weld, Henry Ward Beecher, and many others : but it 
cost them all their ecclesiastical consideration and con- 
sequence to do so. They declared in the face of their 
truculent and for the time triumphant fellow-sectaries, 
that the Lord was as actively current, though in invisi- 
ble form, in our affairs as He had ever been in those of 



536 Appendix. 

old Jewry : that He was indeed far more bitterly pro- 
faned in spirit by our persistent Christian inhumanity to 
the humblest victim of oppression in the land, than He 
was ever profaned in the flesh by all the ignominy and 
injury which Jew or Roman had inflicted upon Him. 
So spiritual and living a sensibility to the Divine name 
as this could not help calling forth, and making visible 
to every eye, the deep-seated practical unbelief and 
atheism of the church ; and these men accordingly have 
incurred at the hands of our more obscene religious 
newspapers, an acrimony of vituperation and a malignity 
of hatred, which Mr. Garrison and Mr. Phillips, who 
are respectively the impetuous Peter and the eloquent 
Paul of the Abolition apostolate, could hardly fail 
to envy. 1 

Immortal honor then befall these stainless names, and 
all which have since been as stainlessly associated with 
them, our Andrews and Butlers and Bankses and Rose- 
cranses and Mitchells and Hunters and Henrys and 
Vintons and Mitchells and Brownsons and Burnsides 
and Dixes and- Wrights and Owens and Johnsons and 
Stantons, and whomsoever else of whatever name 
whose manhood — in this majestic spiritual assize of 
God where He is subtly and silently dividing His sheep 
from the goats — has kept them from descending to the 

1 Though I have a great respect done the master : and hence 
for the "Abolitionists" personal- wound the self-love of the lat- 
ly, based upon their thorough ter and exasperate his cupidity, 
truth and manliness as contrast- in place of conciliating his good 
ed with the sordid and skulking will, and enlightening his under- 
crew who have always formed standing. The practical work- 
the bulk of their assailants, I yet ing of the institution has been 
have never been able to justify on the whole, I doubt not, favor- 
philosophically their attitude to- able to the slave in amoral point 
wards slavery. They attack sla- of view ; it is only the master 
very as an institution rather than who from recent developments 
as a principle ; that is, on moral seems to have been degraded by 
grounds rather than spiritual; it, spiritually, out of every linea- 
making it primarily a wrong ment of manhood, 
done the slave rather than one 



Jppendix. 537 

level of the swine ! These are they to whom, whether 
they have ever outwardly invoked His name or not, the 
king spiritually says : Come ye blessed of my Father, in- 
herit the kingdom of God prepared for you from the foun- 
dation of the world. For I was an hungered, and ye gave 
me meat ; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink ; a stran- 
ger, and ye took me in ; naked, and ye clothed me ; sick, 
and ye visited me ; in bondage, and ye came unto me. And 
these are they who, with all like them, in unfeigned 
amazement to learn that they were thus inwardly honor- 
ing Him whom they never outwardly so much as thought 
of, when they were simply obeying the instincts of uni- 
versal justice in their own souls, exclaim : Lord! when 
saw we thee hungry and fed thee ; or thirsty, and gave 
thee drink ; when saw we thee a stranger, and took thee 
in ; naked and clothed thee ; or when saw we thee sick or 
in prison, and came untothse? And the king shall an- 
swer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch 
as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my breth- 
ren, ye have done it unto me. See Matthew, xxv., 31- 

4 6 - . . . . 

This, in brief, is why I think a new and Divine style 

of manhood, a new because a living church, is ripe for 
inauguration upon this continent, namely : that when 
our pretended priests proved recreant to every Godward 
— and our pretended politicians to every manward — 
obligation, the people themselves were so inwardly 
moved as to resume their betrayed sovereignty, and to 
affirm with such an emphasis the non-extension of sla- 
very, as to precipitate the slaveholder's rebellion, and by 
so doing put a speedy end both to slavery itself, and to 
the conjoint sacerdotal and political profligacy by which 
alone its existence had been guaranteed. 



538 Appendix. 



NOTE J. Page 480. 

Maternity is as yet a comparative qualification with 
every woman ; no one being absolutely qualified for it, 
nor capable of becoming so until the advent of a true 
society among men shall have insured to mothers 
themselves fit conditions of nativity. No woman is 
positively qualified for maternity, /. e, able to do physi- 
cal justice to the fruit of her womb, who is not herself 
in previous harmony with the Common Mother of whose 
grander benignity she is but a particular form, but a 
special type or image. And manifestly no woman can 
ever attain to that harmony, until society shall have first 
come to proper self-consciousness, and done her obvious 
duty to all her members, by insuring them conditions 
of climate, of food, of clothing, of lodging, of active 
occupation and passive enjoyment, which shall be suit- 
able to their natural genius, and yield them consequently 
a physical health equal to every conceivable exigency 
of the soul. In like manner no father is absolutely fit 
to become a father or to do justice to the spiritual per- 
sonality of his child, who is not previously qualified for 
his function by a heart of equal love, and a mind of 
equal truth, to his fellow-man. And none of us is ca- 
pable of these things so long as our private individuality 
is biased, belittled and bedeviled by an enforced deference 
to merely ecclesiastical and political institutions, which 
however they once may have imperfectly represented a 
true society, yet never constituted it, and now no longer 
do even thus much, but on the contrary foully mis-rep- 
resent, embarrass and obstruct it. 

In a word the putative mother of the child is only a 
quasi mother, hiding it from light and air in her tender 
bosom until its soul shall have aggrandized its material 
bulk sufficiently to bring it under the care of the com- 
mon mother, to be dandled thenceforth on her impartial 
knees, and nurtured to manhood upon the milk of her im- 



Appendix. 539 

perial breasts. In like manner the specific father finds 
in every case his narrow spiritual paternity widening 
into that of society, or what at least stands temporarily 
for society and represents it, namely, the current eccle- 
siastical and political life of the community : so that 
the child's immediate parents turn out abjectly mediate 
ones after all, even ludicrously incapable of any true 
responsibility towards it, simply because they are blind 
unconscious instruments of a paternity and maternity 
infinitely more wise, more tender and more efficient. 



THE END. 



Cambridge : Printed by H. O. Houghton. 






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